Innovation Engineer

About Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is on a mission to deliver the urgent transition to fusion energy.

Combining decades of research, top talent, and new technologies, we’re designing and building commercially viable fusion power plants. And we’re working with policymakers and suppliers to build the energy industry of the future.

We’re in the best position to make it happen. Since 2018, we’ve raised nearly $3 billion in capital, making us the largest and leading private fusion company in the world.

Now we’re looking for more thinkers, doers, builders, and makers to join us. People who’ll bring new perspectives, solve tough problems, and thrive as part of a team.

If that’s you and this role fits, we want to hear from you.

The Open Innovation Engineer is an individual who operates at the intersection of deep technical fluency and strategic relationship-building. You will help build the architecture of CFS’ external innovation ecosystem: identifying, recruiting, and activating the world’s best researchers, institutions, and programs to accelerate our roadmap and retire risk. You will represent CFS to National Laboratories, universities, government agencies, international fusion programs, and private partners — and you will bring those relationships to life as funded, milestone-driven technical collaborations that move the needle on the hardest, most consequential engineering problems in the world.

This is not a behind-the-scenes role. You will develop and directly collaborate with CFS and partner technical and business leads to drive programs forward, shape strategy and be in the room when CFS’ most important external decisions get made. If you are someone who wants to be at the tip of the spear on a civilization-defining mission — and who has the technical depth, relationship instincts, and entrepreneurial drive to thrive there — we are building this role for you.

• Create a vision for technical partnerships: Identify, recruit and build new collaborators, programs and relationships with the capabilities required to retire risk and accelerate roadmaps. Partners may include large and small companies, universities, National Labs, non-profit organizations, and foreign research organizations
• Own partner success stories: Take ownership of existing relationships with key international public and private fusion programs and technical teams. Understand how our goals align and where they differ. Drive decision, projects and programs forward. Execute and evolve business processes, guided by technical and relationship insight, to accelerate the CFS commercial pathway.
• Connect the dots: Integrate with internal R&D, engineering, procurement and policy teams to understand the equities involved in a relationship, and how technical and business opportunities and risks can be pursued in the context they create.
• Imagine and create: Pitch, catalyze and deliver new programs and collaborations to CFS technical and business unit leads, and some of the best technical talent in the world, including at the world’s best-known companies. Support innovation processes across company divisions – unite and lead.
• Create opportunities: Devise and execute funding strategies for your program basket, including but not limited to government grants, in‑kind private collaborations, philanthropies, and other internal and external funding. You will have the ownership to make it happen.
• Write the CFS story: Write proposals, white papers, government grant applications, pitches, and relationship briefs that make clear opportunities and risks, with a bias to execution and speed.
• Tackle organizational complexity: Become the expert on your partners, programs, and projects, through insight and execution experience. Support the entire collaborative program life‑cycle, including launch, execution, and conclusion. This includes executing contracts, setting and tracking milestones and deliverables, and memorializing outputs.
• Technically capable business operator: You can read a technical paper and call a National Lab scientist to discuss it; then take a call…