Lead Engineer, Strategic Partnerships

Lead Engineer, Strategic Partnerships

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.

• 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 with an internal commercial lead and external contracts agent or program owner to discuss terms and roadmaps. You are comfortable at the intersection of technical and business environments.
• Strategic thinker: You are able to parse, negotiate and plan your way through a field of intersecting, conflicting or incompletely known organizational roadmaps, finding and creating value where others don’t see it. You can plan the next chess move to advance one or more strategic partnerships, advocate for it, and catalyze internal and external teams to pursue it.
• Self‑starting dynamo: You have relentless energy and drive, and are driven to problem solve and take informed risks in a dynamic, quickly evolving business environment, while recognizing constraints and the needs of colleagues and external partners.
• Life‑long learner: You have an endless curiosity and have demonstrated ability to rapidly learn new, complex technical fields, to the extent that you can converse, plan and execute with experts in those fields.
• Exceptional communicator and negotiator: You have finely honed oral, written and extemporaneous communication skills, proven out in complex technical, programmatic and…