Senior Test Engineer - Space

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.

As a Space Test Engineer on Antares' Mission Engineering team, you will develop and execute tests that demonstrate the performance and reliability of avionics, electrical subsystems, and thermal hardware for space nuclear power systems. You will own testing from requirements and test setup design through execution, data analysis, and reporting, with an emphasis on avionics verification, environmental qualification, and thermal performance.

You will build test infrastructure and work closely with electrical, firmware, thermal, mechanical, and systems engineers to evaluate hardware under representative operating and environmental conditions. Your work will span bench testing, integrated system testing, and campaigns involving thermal vacuum, vibration, shock, and electromagnetic interference and compatibility. You will help identify failures early and turn test results into design improvements.

• Develop verification plans for avionics, power electronics, sensors, and control systems; define test configurations, instrumentation, procedures, and pass/fail criteria tied to requirements.
• Design and execute avionics bench and integrated system tests covering electrical interfaces, command and telemetry, power sequencing, operating modes, fault detection, and recovery.
• Build automated test equipment and hardware-in-the-loop setups using programmable supplies, electronic loads, signal simulation, data acquisition, and flight-like hardware and software.
• Plan and execute environmental test campaigns, including thermal vacuum (TVAC), thermal cycling, vibration, shock, and electromagnetic interference and compatibility (EMI/EMC), working with external laboratories as needed.
• Verify electrical and functional performance before, during, and after environmental exposure; monitor telemetry and investigate intermittent faults, resets, and performance degradation.
• Develop thermal performance and thermal balance tests for avionics, power conversion equipment, and heat transport and rejection hardware; measure temperatures, heat loads, thermal interfaces, and heat rejection performance.
• Design and commission test setups, including instrumentation, harnesses, chamber feedthroughs, thermal interfaces, and supporting fixtures; establish calibration, measurement uncertainty, and equipment protection controls.
• Analyze electrical and thermal data, compare results with predictions and requirements, and document findings to support design decisions and verification closure.
• Lead test readiness reviews, maintain test schedules, and coordinate hardware, personnel, and facility availability with program milestones.
• Lead root cause investigations and corrective action verification; maintain test configuration records and develop repeatable procedures for development, qualification, and acceptance testing.

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