Mission Engineer

Mission Engineering Team Lead

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 $130M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $13M in government funding.

As a key member of the Mission Engineering team, you will lead programs across commercial, defense, and real-world microreactor missions—both on Earth and in space. You will serve as the primary point of contact for a broad range of stakeholders, driving the development and deployment of Antares systems to meet mission needs. You will operate at the intersection of systems engineering and business development, bridging technical product development with operational execution supporting capture and execution of contracts and funding opportunities.

Qualifications include strong engineering and physics fundamentals—particularly in thermodynamics, energy systems, aerospace, and engineering economics—with demonstrated proficiency in systems-level thinking and high technical rigor across disciplines. You will own product integration into operational end-user environments.

Responsibilities include managing project costs, schedules, deliverables, and translating user feedback into actionable internal requirements. You will be expected to contribute to internal product development to ensure Antares' systems can meet mission objectives—including deployment logistics, facility interface definition, transportation requirements, commissioning, and decommissioning of nuclear systems. Success in this role requires a generalist mindset, cross-disciplinary problem-solving, and relentless focus on delivering value to our customers.

The ideal candidate has direct experience interfacing with, or working within, DoD/DOE and understands government procurement processes, is comfortable with the technical details of complex aerospace or defense systems and can communicate effectively across all associated engineering disciplines.

Roles and responsibilities include:

• Lead delivery for customer-facing programs—owning cost/schedule/quality, contractual compliance, and milestone execution—while driving engineering collaboration across disciplines and internal/external reviews to align stakeholders and ensure mission success.
• Establish closed-loop requirements management that connects customer feedback to engineering design inputs and maintains alignment with user requirements and intended use cases.
• Ideate and propose new development programs to DoD and DOE sponsors, and support proposal development and contract acquisition by drafting technical content, interface requirements, operational use case descriptions, and system performance justifications.
• Perform market/use-case analysis and CONOPS research and develop internal technical roadmaps to ensure product readiness for specific deployments and customer mission needs.
• Lead and contribute to system architecture and interface specifications for strategic energy applications, ensuring that engineering decisions incorporate business considerations and cost-benefit tradeoffs across design, integration, and delivery.

Basic qualifications include:

• Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline (mechanical, aerospace, nuclear, systems, etc.), physics, or applied science.
• 3+ years of experience in complex, safety-critical or defense/aerospace programs with accountability for cost/schedule/technical performance and formal review gates.
• Systems engineering proficiency and agile best practices in deep technology, with demonstrated cross-disciplinary systems thinking for complex technical systems.
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