Principal Tooling Design Engineer

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.

The Antares team hails from SpaceX, the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, MIT, Rigetti Computing, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Idaho, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Savannah River. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has hundreds of million‑dollars on contract with the military services, NASA, and the Department of Energy.

• Own the design, development, fabrication, qualification, and implementation of tooling and ground support equipment required to manufacture, assemble, test, transport, install, service, and ultimately decommission Antares R1 microreactors.

• Work directly with manufacturing, test, reactor hardware, operations, quality, and deployment teams to understand how hardware will actually be built and handled, identify tooling needs, and translate those needs into practical engineering solutions.

• Develop tooling concepts from first principles, balancing safety, usability, manufacturability, schedule, cost, reliability, and the constraints of both factory and field environments.

• Create detailed 3D CAD models, assemblies, and engineering drawings for fixtures, handling equipment, lifting devices, assembly tooling, test support equipment, transportation fixtures, installation equipment, and other specialized mechanical systems. Siemens NX experience is preferred.

• Perform mechanical design and basic engineering analysis necessary to ensure tooling is structurally adequate, stable, safe to operate, and appropriate for its intended loads and environments.

• Design tooling with the operator in mind, including ergonomics, access, alignment, tolerance stack‑up, repeatability, mistake‑proofing, inspection access, maintainability, and efficient integration into manufacturing and test workflows.

• Take designs beyond the drawing package by working hands‑on with machinists, welders, technicians, suppliers, and engineers to fabricate, assemble, troubleshoot, modify, and commission tooling.

• Direct and support the initial use of new tooling on the factory floor and at deployment sites, incorporating operator feedback and observed performance into rapid design improvements.

• Develop ground support equipment and handling solutions for large, heavy, sensitive, or high‑value reactor hardware, including equipment used for lifting, positioning, alignment, transportation, installation, and removal.

• Support integrated reactor and subsystem testing by developing fixtures, test stands, interfaces, temporary structures, and other equipment needed to safely configure and operate development and qualification hardware.

• Develop tooling and equipment required for reactor transportation and site deployment, accounting for packaging, shipping, field handling, limited site infrastructure, environmental conditions, and installation sequence.

• Partner with deployment and reactor engineering teams to develop tooling concepts and procedures for future maintenance, removal, and decommissioning activities so that lifecycle handling considerations are incorporated into the reactor design early.

• Generate and maintain complete engineering definition for tooling, including drawings, bills of material, specifications, load requirements, operating limits,…