Senior Mechatronics Engineer

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 $39M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $4M in government funding.

About the Team

As the founding member of the Controls Engineering team, you will be Antares’ expert on control systems. You will work on designing and building the systems that operate, regulate, and report the telemetry of our microreactor. You will help develop and document our system architecture, requirements, control algorithms, and mechanisms. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of full-stack sensor and control projects and will have at least a light background in robotics. Additionally, you will provide nuanced input into the system architecture trades and take a lead role in managing vendor relationships and our test program.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Here are some examples of projects you could be working on:

• Design and test of our Reactor's control drum mechanisms

• Conceptualization of bespoke actuation system mechanisms, components, linkages, and instrumentation

• Definition of design criteria, subsystems requirements & architecture, and requisite test regimes

• Coordination with cross-discipline teams of engineers spanning thermal, structural, neutronics, controls and simulation expertise

• Design of novel components for high temperature, high stress, and radioactive environments comprised of metal, ceramic, and other novel materials

• Design for manufacturability (DFM) trades

• Trade studies pertaining to different mechanism design concepts for consideration by senior leadership

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering or related technical discipline

• 5+ years of experience in a full-cycle design engineering roles, encompassing hands-on experience with CAD, analysis, build and test

• Experience with kinematic synthesis, pneumatic/hydraulic actuation, mechatronics and instrumentation

• Experience with FMEA including structure strength, stability and fatigue failure modes

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience in the Nuclear, Aerospace, or Robotics industries

• Experience in a demanding fast pace development environment

• Experience with design engineering tools such as NX, ANSYS or Femap, and other product lifecycle software

• Experience with engineering scripting languages such as Python and MATLAB

Additional Requirements:

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

Location

• We are located in Torrance, CA in a 145,000 square foot, brand new facility featuring large open spaces for team collaboration, R&D, and production, as well as easy access to the 405, 105, and 110 freeways. Our facility is in the heart of Los Angeles' vibrant emerging tech ecosystem alongside many other high growth startups and enterprises.

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 with 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

• Obsess over the End User - The customer and end user are often not the same. We will never build globally competitive commercial products if we lose sight of our end users and their entire interaction with the product life cycle

• Be Unconstrained by Convention - Our only limits are the laws of physics. Many, even experts, will say what we are wo