Senior Motion Control Systems Engineer

Alameda, CA;
Albuquerque, NM;
Oak Ridge, TN

Kairos Power is a new nuclear energy technology and engineering company whose mission is to enable the world’s transition to clean energy, with the ultimate goal to dramatically improve people’s quality of life while protecting the environment. This goal will be accomplished through the commercialization of the fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (FHR) that can be deployed with robust safety, affordable costs, and flexible operation to accommodate the expansion of variable renewables.

Kairos Power is seeking a Senior Motion Control Engineer to join the Plant Control Systems team. This role leads programming, electrical design, and integration of motion-control, mechanical-handling, and motor-driven equipment—including cranes, hoists, manipulators, lifts, positioning systems, conveyors, and remotely operated equipment for use in an advanced nuclear power plant.

The engineer specifies and integrates motors, drives, instrumentation, safety functions, operator interfaces, and plant-control-system interfaces. The role designs and integrates control systems and equipment for a nuclear environment, with attention to safety, defined functional boundaries, documented requirements, verification, configuration control, and rigorous testing throughout the equipment lifecycle—from requirements and design through commissioning and operation.

The engineer is expected to provide technical leadership, mentor less-experienced engineers, lead complex design activities, and independently resolve significant technical issues. The position does not require direct personnel-management responsibility.

• Serve as responsible engineer, system owner, or technical lead for assigned motion-control, electrical-control, motor-drive, and mechanical-handling systems.
• Develop and maintain requirements, functional specifications, interface-control documents, design descriptions, calculations, drawings, equipment data sheets, and verification records.
• Translate plant operating, equipment, environmental, maintenance, and safety requirements into practical electrical and control-system designs.
• Define operating modes, local and remote control functions, manual and automatic operation, startup and shutdown sequences, equipment protection, fault response, alarms, interlocks, permissives, trips, and safe-state behavior.
• Specify and integrate AC motors, servo motors, stepper motors, VFDs, servo drives, stepper drives, motor starters, gearboxes, brakes, encoders, resolvers, limit switches, proximity sensors, load cells, instrumentation, safety devices, control panels, and related equipment.
• Perform or review motor sizing, torque-speed characteristics, duty-cycle and thermal analyses, load and inertia calculations, acceleration/deceleration profiles, drive sizing, braking requirements, cable sizing, electrical protection, grounding, shielding, and power-quality considerations.
• Develop or review electrical schematics, panel layouts, wiring diagrams, termination drawings, I/O lists, loop diagrams, control narratives, functional logic diagrams, cause-and-effect matrices, and test procedures.
• Develop, configure, review, and test PLC, motion-controller, DCS-interface, HMI, SCADA, and related control software using established software-development, peer-review, testing, release, and configuration-management practices.
• Define interfaces for equipment commands, status, position feedback, alarms, diagnostics, permissives, trips, safety signals, remote monitoring, data collection, event logging, and maintenance diagnostics.
• Integrate assigned equipment with plant controls, supervisory systems, industrial networks, remote…