Director, Nuclear Instrumentation & Electronics

About Valar Atomics

At Valar Atomics, we're redefining what's possible in energy. Our mission is to make clean, high-temperature nuclear power scalable—unlocking abundant energy for industry, hydrogen, and next-generation manufacturing. We are a team of builders, engineers, and operators who believe nuclear energy should be fast to deploy, factory-made, and built for the real world. Our first pilot plant in Orangeville, Utah will demonstrate how advanced nuclear systems and fuel fabrication can power the future.

Joining Valar Atomics means becoming part of a company where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level.

The Team

You will lead a new product organization within Valar Atomics' Instrumentation, Control & Electrical (IC&E) organization, supplying hardware to the Reactor program across development, demonstration, and serial production units. The team you build will span detector design, analog and digital electronics, firmware, qualification and test, production engineering, and manufacturing operations. You will work alongside reactor I&C, automation and controls, reactor physics, nuclear safety, quality, supply chain, and licensing teams in a hands‑on environment where measurement integrity directly supports reactor safety and production throughput.

The team values technical depth, disciplined documentation, and a safety‑first culture.

The Role

Valar Atomics is seeking Directors of Nuclear Instrumentation & Electronics to build and lead the organization that designs, qualifies, and manufactures the nuclear instrumentation and electronics required to scale reactor production. The role owns the full product lifecycle for neutron detectors, radiation monitors, signal processing electronics, and associated nuclear‑grade hardware, from detector physics and circuit design through qualification, production engineering, manufacturing, and field support.

The nuclear instrumentation supply base is thin, slow, and not built for serial reactor deployment; this role exists to make it an in‑house capability that ships qualified hardware at production volume, on schedule, to nuclear quality standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Nuclear Instrumentation & Electronics organization, including hiring, organizational design, and development of engineering, test, and manufacturing teams; set technical standards and a culture of ownership and execution.
• Define and own the product roadmap for nuclear instrumentation and electronics, including make‑versus‑buy decisions, platform strategy, and cost, volume, and schedule targets aligned to the reactor production ramp.
• Own design of neutron flux detection hardware across source, intermediate, and power ranges, including fission chambers, ion chambers, proportional counters, and in‑core or high‑temperature detectors suited to the HTGR environment.
• Own design of radiation monitoring instrumentation, including area, process, and effluent monitors and associated detector assemblies.
• Own design of nuclear signal processing electronics, including high‑voltage bias supplies, preamplifiers, pulse, current, and Campbell mode processing, digital pulse processing, FPGA and embedded firmware, and interfaces to protection and control systems.
• Lead equipment qualification programs, including environmental qualification (IEEE 323), seismic qualification (IEEE 344), EMI/RFI compatibility (Reg Guide 1.180), radiation and thermal aging, and qualification test planning, execution, and reporting.
• Ensure designs meet applicable nuclear safety system requirements, including IEEE 603, IEEE 7-4.3.2 for digital content, and software/firmware lifecycle and V&V requirements, in coordination with reactor I&C and licensing teams.
• Stand up and scale manufacturing…