Lead Metallurgical Forging Engineer — Ultra- Components

The Nuclear Company is the fastest growing startup in the nuclear and energy space creating a never before seen fleet-scale approach to building nuclear reactors. Through its design-once, build-many approach and coalition building across communities, regulators, and financial stakeholders, The Nuclear Company is committed to delivering safe and reliable electricity at the lowest cost, while catalyzing the nuclear industry toward rapid development in America and globally.

The Nuclear Company is hiring a Lead Metallurgical Process Engineer to define how Project FORGE manufactures ultra-large, safety-critical metal components. This is the foundational technical role on the FORGE Engineering Cell—the person who owns process design from feedstock materials to ultra-large raw-forged components.

This is a role for someone who wants to study the best forging operations in the world, understands the physics that make them work, and then design something fundamentally better. The goal is a step capital efficiency, and quality.

The role will be remote to start with an expected relocation to Washington, DC in 2027.

• Define the process flow for ultra-large forging operations: melting, casting, ingot conditioning, forging sequences, and heat treatment.
• Study existing world‑class facilities (JSW Muroran, Doosan Changwon, Sheffield Forge masters, CFHI, North American Forge masters) to understand current best practice, and then systematically challenge assumptions about why each process step exists and how it should be executed.
• Understand the process steps, parameters, and physical/chemical phenomena that drive homogenization and impurity removal during large ingot casting.
• Develop forging process models from first principles: deformation mechanics, thermal profiles, microstructural evolution, and die design for components including reactor pressure vessel shells, steam generator forgings, turbine rotor shafts, and defense applications.
• Identify opportunities to fundamentally improve quality, energy consumption, and capital equipment requirements relative to existing global benchmarks.
• Collaborate with the project team to produce equipment cost and construction schedule estimates to drive project stage gate deliverables.
• Develop the preliminary process design basis document that will feed into detailed engineering for the melting, forging, and heat treatment shops.
• Interface with Japanese and allied technical partners to absorb operational knowledge while maintaining an independent, critical perspective on process design.

This role requires genuine metallurgical and metal‑forming expertise. But we want someone who holds that expertise as a foundation for rethinking, not as a fixed playbook.

• Deep understanding of the process steps, parameters, and physical/chemical phenomena that drive homogenization and purity during from stock materials through large ingot casting.
• Deep understanding of grain structure formation as a function of heat treatment parameters.
• Deep understanding of the thermomechanics of open‑die forging, including deformation behavior of low‑alloy and stainless steels at forging temperatures, grain refinement mechanisms, and the relationship between forging parameters and final mechanical properties.
• Experience with large‑scale metal forming, heat treatment, or steelmaking processes—ideally in an environment that valued process optimization and cost discipline, not just process execution.
• A demonstrated track record of challenging conventional approaches and developing novel process solutions based on fundamental understanding rather than precedent.
• Comfort operating as the domain expert on a team of sharp generalists who will constantly ask “why?”—and the intellectual humility to say “I don’t know yet, let’s figure it out.”
• 7–15 years of experience. We are specifically looking for someone who has enough depth to be authoritative but has not spent so long in a single paradigm that they cannot see outside it.
• Experience in downstream precision machining is a bonus.

Process engineering at a heavy forging, specialty steel, or large casting…