Turbomachinery Engineer

Antares Turbo machinery Engineer

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.

As a member of the R&D team, you will be Antares' expert on turbo machinery. You will take ownership of the entire closed brayton power conversion system, performing detailed mechanical design, rotordynamic/structural analysis, and test. You will be directly responsible for ensuring multiple year system reliability and manufacturability.

The ideal candidate will have experience with full system thermodynamic balances, CAD, the ANSYS suite, and fatigue/fracture analysis. Additionally they will have designed, instrumented, and conducted tests that validate their system.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• Design, analyze, build, and test turbopumps for the Antares reactors
• Own critical turbo machinery components and be responsible for every aspect of the turbo machinery design, demonstrate ownership and work in close collaboration with test, controls, and quality engineers
• Ensure that detailed mechanical analysis is performed on all the turbopump components/systems. Review drawings and make sure that selected designs meet the required standards for life and reliability targets
• Create test schematics and CAD models of proposed test setups/facilities
• Devise accurate and correct models, develop new methodologies and first principles-based tools to determine turbopump performance and operability
• Build test schedules and ensure alignment with relevant development and business needs
• Support both component and assembly testing. Be involved with defining the test configuration, the test process/execution and review the results to confirm
• Lead the resolution of issues encountered with the turbopump during development/qualification testing
• Support ongoing design improvements to turbopump assemblies and/or sub systems including manufacturing improvements to reduce cost and lead time of components
• Participate in root cause investigations that arise in test and field operation, implement corrective actions to prevent repeat failures

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline or physics
• 5+ years of experience in the design of turbo machinery
• Experience designing assemblies and test fixtures using CAD systems

Preferred

Skills & Experience:

• Strong interpersonal and collaborative skills, enthusiasm for problem solving, and desire to optimize modern nuclear design and operation.
• 5+ years of professional experience in the mechanical or aerospace engineering fields.
• Demonstrable experience designing, building, testing and troubleshooting mechanical systems.
• Broad knowledge of instrumentation and sensors, with knowledge on tradeoffs and methods to integrate them reliably into designs / test setups
• Strong understanding of pump hydrodynamic/aerodynamic design and fundamentals of turbo machinery (mechanical design, and hands on experience with turbo machinery hardware build)
• Experience using LabVIEW, SIMULINK, or other test software
• Demonstrated track record of high impact / ROI contributions
• Strong project management skills and effective communication of technical concepts across multi-disciplinary teams.
• Clean sheet design
• Manufactoring
• Hands-on experience with fluid, gas, or high voltage systems.

Additional Requirements:

• Ability to work long hours and weekends as necessary to support critical milestones
• Ability to lift 50 lbs unassisted; standing, climbing, bending, grasping, sitting, pulling, pushing, stooping, stretching, and carrying…