Senior Controls Engineer - Software / Robotics

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, elevate global living standards, and expand humanity's presence in outer space. To achieve our mission, we’re building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors that can be used terrestrially, underwater, and in space.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, Ultra Safe Nuclear, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Antares has raised over $39M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $4M in government funding. 

About the Team

As the founding member of the Controls Engineering team, you will be Antares’ expert on control systems. You will work on designing and building the systems that operate, regulate, and report the telemetry of our microreactor. You will help develop and document our system architecture, requirements, control algorithms, and mechanisms. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of full-stack sensor and control projects and will have at least a light background in robotics. Additionally, you will provide nuanced input into the system architecture trades and take a lead role in managing vendor relationships and our test program. 

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Survey COTS and potentially perform low-level design of sensor solutions/suites for thermal control, actuation, and neutron-flux monitoring systems

• Perform routine system identification of reactor core subsystems and sensors

• Prototyping Monte Carlo simulations for physical systems

• Verification and validation of all controls subsystems and applications

• Construct and maintain Interface Control Documents for internal and external systems interacting with the reactor core

• Prototyping controls software in embedded and application-layer environments

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years experience working in an environment with hardware-software co-design including the following:

• Handling, recording, and analysis of digital and analog telemetry from sensor and controls subsystems

• Experience with Laplace domain controls design, analysis, and implementation in mixed analog and digital platform

• Experience developing linear servo, field-oriented-control, and other similar actuation controls systems

• Expertise in Python, and C++, particularly prototyping in Python followed by conversion to application and embedded C++ environments

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience with logic analyzers, data acquisition modules, oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers

• Experience with ethernet, CAN, serial and 4-20 mA telemetry variants

• Experience writing controls algorithms in an embedded C/C++ environment with strict timing requirements

• High level of experience converting continuous time domain, frequency domain and discrete-time models between one another

• Experience constructing and conducting system identification exercises to ultimately yield high-fidelity models for Monte Carlo simulation purposes

• Familiarity with nonlinear dynamics and how to identify them in analysis space as well as in field data

• High level of experience separating, evaluating, and benchmarking (through simulation and field testing) cross-coupled dynamics between parallel control systems

• Experience with Kalman filtering and sensor fusion

• High level of experience with linear transfer function analysis

• Experience with fault-tolerant architecture and design

Additional Requirements:

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

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

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.