Computational Materials Scientist

About Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is on a mission to deliver the urgent transition to fusion energy. Combining decades of research, top talent, and new technologies, we’re designing and building commercially viable fusion power plants. And working with policymakers and suppliers to build the energy industry of the future. We’re in the best position to make it happen. Since 2018, we’ve raised nearly $3 billion in capital, making us the largest and leading private fusion company in the world.

Now we’re looking for more thinkers, doers, builders, and makers to join us. People who’ll bring new perspectives, solve tough problems, and thrive as part of a team. If that’s you and this role fits, we want to hear from you.

The Materials and Processing (M&P) Department at CFS supports design engineers, supply chain, and manufacturing by selecting materials, unambiguously defining materials and processing routes, validating and measuring those materials and their properties, and conducting R&D to develop new materials and processes to enable fusion power deployment. M&P at CFS is organized around three primary thrusts: engineering, test and characterization, and development programs.

The work is undertaken in support of delivering SPARC, the net energy tokamak under construction in Devens, MA, and ultimately in designing the ARC fusion power plant. These devices pose unique materials challenges including neutron fluxes produced by deuterium-tritium fusion, high heat loads, molten salt coolant systems, complex component topologies, high magnetic fields, and high mechanical loading in cryogenic conditions.

To support this mission, the CFS Materials Department is seeking a Computational Materials Engineer with expertise in process-structure-properties relationships, physics informed modeling, and materials in extreme environments. The ideal candidate would have a background in both computational materials simulation methods, and materials science and/or physical chemistry. The responsibilities will include physics-based modeling, synthetic data generation, and first-principles modeling and simulation to support development of CFS materials.

They will collaborate with other engineers and subject matter experts to identify highest sensitivity parameters and prioritize experimental work for greatest impact to decreasing uncertainty.

• Use and build computational toolsets to generate predicted material properties in extreme environments including temperature, radiation, and magnetic field with uncertainty bounds informed by physical mechanisms
• In collaboration with design and analysis engineers, develop material design curves methodology capable of determining statistically significant minimum properties for tokamak applications such as low and high cycle fatigue, dielectric breakdown, radiation effects.
• Identify gaps in knowledge and experimental capability which can be filled via simulation or model building
• Assist in benchmarking and creating metrics for material property variability and sources of variability in manufacturing processes
• Collaborate with other M&P Engineers to create workflows to enable the appropriate capture, storage, data visualization and analysis of data generated within the materials domain
• Support writing materials standard specifications
• Stay current with the evolving technology and modeling techniques

• MS in Materials Science Engineering, Applied Physics, Physical Chemistry, or related field
• Minimum of 3+ years’ experience in experimental or computational materials science
• Implementation and/or authorship of codes for calculation and analyses of material properties
• Building predictive models for material properties in extreme environments
• Validation of models with experimental data or physical mechanism bounds
• Process failure modes or physical mechanism driven hypothesis formulation and design of experiments
• Understanding process-structure-properties-performance principles and fundamental mechanisms responsible for property changes in extreme environments
• Understanding of…