Senior/Staff Electrical Systems Engineer

About the company

Antares is a nuclear power startup developing small modular reactors (SMRs) using TRISO fuel for deployment at U.S. military bases.

About this role

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, and National Laboratories like Los Alamos, Idaho, and Oak Ridge. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $13M in government funding. About the Role Our reactor's Instrumentation and Controls system is fundamentally an electrical system: sensors and transmitters, signal conditioning and I/O, instrument power and distribution, actuators and their drive electronics, control panels, and every cable and interface between them. This role owns the electrical requirements for that system and the evidence that it work, what each element must do, how it can fail, how we prove its performance, and how we defend those claims to a regulator. You'll work at the layer where control intent becomes hardware behavior: signal accuracy, response time, failure states, electrical interfaces, redundancy, power quality, and system integration. Your work establishes the technical baseline that controls software, testing, licensing, and plant operations rely on. This role carries technical authority over the I&C requirements baseline, ensuring every requirement is clear, traceable, and verifiable. Roles & Responsibilities: - Work with electrical system Responsible Engineers to create the requirement baseline: Capture regulatory, functional, performance, safety, and concept-of-operations requirements, decompose them to the component level, and make sure every one of them carries measurable, verifiable acceptance criteria. No requirement leaves your hands without a way to prove it was met. - Own and maintain interface control documents: Define and hold the hardware and software ICDs across every electrical system — signal definitions, ranges, timing, protocols, power and grounding, failure and default states — so that subsystem teams can build independently and still integrate. - Own the I&C Design FMEA: Drive failure mode identification to completion, score severity, occurrence, and detection, and calculate risk priority numbers. Then make the analysis matter: build and drive the test plan that burns down the high-RPN modes, and track them to closure. - Create the design validation and qualification plan: Define what qualification means for each I&C system, then partner with the test team to specify test setups, test cases, instrumentation, and pass/fail criteria — and support execution on the bench and in the testbed when it counts. - Support the licensing case: Translate system design into the documentation a regulator reads: work with the licensing and systems engineering teams to produce and defend the I&C content in our safety analysis and design documents, and keep requirements traceability intact from regulation down to test result. - Own site certification for non-listed components: Where the electrical system uses components without an existing UL listing, own the path to acceptance — field evaluation with an NRTL, the supporting technical documentation, and the relationship with the authority having jurisdiction. - Support grid interconnection: Partner with the mission and deployment teams as the electrical technical lead when we interconnect at a site: interpret utility interconnection requirements, support interconnection studies and applications, and translate what the utility demands — protection and relaying, power quality, ride-through and trip settings, metering, disconnection and islanding behavior — into requirements our design actually has to meet. - Own the electrical requirements conversation with customers: Work directly with customers to capture their load requirements — profiles, critical and non-critical loads, power quality expectations, redundancy and availability — along with their user interface and data requirements, and bring those back as specified, verifiable requirements rather than expectations captured in an email thread. - Bridge controls software and physical hardware: Work with the software and controls team to close the gap between operator interfaces and alarms, control law behavior, and the response times and physical characteristics of real sensors, actuators, and I/O. Identify the edge cases — sensor failure, signal loss, out-of-range, degraded modes, timing margins — and make sure each one is accounted for in both the control law and the test plan. - Influence design through review: Bring requirements and integration insight into cross-functional design reviews, and hold the line on decisions that would compromise verifiability or the licensing case. Basic Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related field - 7+ years in electrical or I&C systems engineering, including ownership of a requirement baseline through verification - Demonstrated experience writing decomposed, verifiable requirements with measurable acceptance criteria - Demonstrated experience leading FMEA or equivalent structured reliability analysis, and converting the output into a real test and mitigation plan - Experience authoring validation and qualification plans and working directly with a test organization to execute them - Experience defining and maintaining hardware and software interface control documents across organizational boundaries - Experience delivering hardware under a formal quality program, NQA-1, 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, AS9100, IEC 61508, or c