Head of Finance

About Us

At Antares, our long-term mission is to make clean energy abundant from Earth to the Asteroid Belt. We’re fueled by the belief that advanced nuclear energy can strengthen our military, solve the climate crisis, elevate global living standards, and expand humanity's presence in outer space. To achieve our mission, we’re building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors that can be used terrestrially, underwater, and in space.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, Ultra Safe Nuclear, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Antares has raised over $90M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has booked over $10M in government contracts.

About the Role

As an early member of the finance team, you will enable the business to meet our near-term mission with limited capital and resources while planning for long-term growth and expansion to produce many reactors per year. At a high level, you will own a majority of traditional finance functions, with a focus on maturing those that are critical to our business success as we transition from an early-stage company to revenue-generating.

The ideal candidate will be able to execute in an ambiguous environment, with the ability to wear many ‘hats’ day-to-day – the finance team will interface with nearly every organization in the company, and will be pivotal in the success of transitioning from early operations to high-rate production.

Responsibilities

• Develop early finance functions for the business across accounting, tax and compliance, treasury, FP&A, and others – many of these functions will be immature or nonexistent to start and will need to evolve over time

• Manage the company’s treasury and working capital to balance returns and liquidity as the business expands, including debt mechanisms from institutional banks and lenders when appropriate

• Support the executive team in fundraising, including the creation and maintenance of operating plans, preparing diligence reports, and interfacing with investors

• Implement and improve policies and procedures for effective cost accounting and timekeeping, particularly as it relates to government contracts and DCAA compliance

• Coordinate with engineering and production teams to forecast and manage capital expenditures (CapEx) as the company expands its operations

• Collaborate with commercial and government sales teams to ensure that we are pricing proposals accurately and are able to communicate long-term economics through cost modeling and capital planning

• Lead regular reviews with the leadership team related to actual financial performance and proactive forecasting to avoid pitfalls and pivot when needed

• Create and maintain budgets for various research and development projects or product lines as appropriate, ensuring that the team can achieve their desired outcome while being cost-conscious and scrappy

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, mathematics, physics, engineering, business or a related field from an accredited university

• 5+ years of professional experience in a finance, business, consulting or operations function

Preferred Skills and Experience

• 3+ years of experience in finance, business, consulting or operations function within a manufacturing industry

• Broad experience across tax, accounting, FP&A, data analytics, and other finance functions

• Familiarity and experience with accounting for government contracts and interfacing with the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA)

• Proven success in a start-up environment or similar, with the ability to manage ambiguity and wear many different hats

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work long hours and weekends as necessary to support critical milestones

Culture

At Antares, we like to specifically tie each role to our founding document’s set of values–here are the top five cultural values we think you should believe at your core to be successful:

• Think in Systems - Energy and Defense are complex ecosystems that have numerous stakeholders with competing priorities, conflicting policies, perverse incentives, and emergent and path-dependent properties. First principles thinking alone is insufficient. Think probabilistically and then take action. “If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete”. Over-optimizing the components often degrades the system