Mission Operations Engineer

About Us

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, and elevate global standards of living. To achieve our mission, we’re building mass-producible, inherently safe, transportable microreactors that can be used terrestrially and in space.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Ursa Major, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. They have raised over $8M in capital from top-tier investors, including Caffeinated Capital and Susa Ventures.

About the Role

As a key member of the Mission Engineering team, you will own programs and projects associated with DoD mission areas and real-world microreactor operations.  This is a multifaceted role that will require you to serve as a primary point of contact to a diverse set of stakeholders to further the development and deployment of Antares systems to meet the needs of our end-users.  This will include managing project costs, schedules, and deliverables as well as owning internal requirements development based on customer feedback.   You will thrive in applying a generalist skillset to solve issues across myriad technical disciplines and in working creatively and tirelessly to meet the needs of our users.

The ideal candidate will have experience directly interfacing with or working within DoD/DOE and will have an understanding of government procurement processes.  Candidates should be comfortable with the technical details of complex aerospace or defense systems and will be expected to be able to effectively communicate across all associated engineering disciplines.  

Roles and Responsibilities

• Own all aspects of project management associated with ongoing customer-facing development programs

• Regularly distill engineering information and create feedback loops to ensure alignment with user requirements and intended use cases.

• Ideate and propose new development programs to DOD and DOE funding sources

• Build out compliance processes associated with contractual requirements and clauses

• Craft requirements management processes to connect customer feedback into engineering design processes

• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure end-to-end mission success and craft deliverables for customer programs

• Plan and drive internal and external reviews to ensure alignment between Antares engineering teams and external stakeholders

• Perform market research on possible use cases and operational concepts for future Antares systems

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline or physics

• 5+ years of technical project management experience

• Experience working with the Department of Defense (DOD) or Department of Energy (DOE)

• Knowledge of systems engineering and best practices for agile methodologies

• U.S. Citizen status required

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Strong interpersonal and collaborative skills, enthusiasm for problem-solving, and desire to optimize modern nuclear design and operation.

• Master’s degree in an engineering field

• PMP or other relevant professional project management certification

• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills

• Excellent negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills

• Leadership experience on a project or research team.

• Experience working in a start-up environment

• Demonstrated track record of crafting winning government proposals and winning DOD/DOE business

• Demonstrated track record of high impact / ROI contributions
  

Additional Requirements 

• Ability to work long hours and weekends as necessary to support critical milestones 

• Ability to travel to customer and mission-relevant locations as needed

• Ability to obtain a Top Secret or Top Secret SCI clearance is preferred

Culture

At Antares, we like to specifically tie each role to our founding document’s set of values–here are the top five cultural values we think you should believe at your core to be successful:

• Think in Systems - Energy and Defense are complex ecosystems with numerous stakeholders with competing priorities, conflicting policies, perverse incentives, and emergent and path-dependent properties. First principles thinking alone is insufficient. Think probabilistically and then take action. “If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete.” Over-optimizing the components often degrades the system. 

• Obsess over the End User - The customer and end user are often not the same. We will never build globally competitive commercial products if we lose sight of our end users and their entire interaction with the product life cycle 

• Be Unconstrained by Convention - Our only limits are the laws of physics. Many, even experts, will say what we are working on is impossible. They said the same about SpaceX reusing rockets. Generationally impactful companies, by definition, must accomplish the seemingly impossible. If it were easy, it would have already been done. Never shy away from a solution because it has never been tried before, and never choose to do something because that's “how it's always been done.” 

• Craftsmen - We also focus on the inputs. We aspire to high-quality engineering for its own sake. As such, we invest in personal growth, learning, and developing a long-term career path for exceptional individual contributors. We embrace a beginner’s mindset, share knowledge, and never condescend the curious. 

• Loyally Collaborative - Team > Self. We win together. There is nothing more precious than a high-performing team.