Strategic Finance Associate

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. The Antares team hails from SpaceX, the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, MIT, Rigetti Computing, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Idaho, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Savannah River. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has hundreds of million-dollars on contract with the military services, NASA, and the Department of Energy. About the Role Antares is looking for a Strategic Finance Associate to join our growing Finance organization. You will work directly with the Head of Finance and company leadership on some of the most important financial and strategic decisions facing the business. This is not a traditional FP&A role. You will work across corporate finance, financial modeling, manufacturing economics, capital allocation, commercial and government programs, fundraising, and long-range planning. You'll help translate complex technical and operational decisions into their financial implications and provide leadership with the analysis needed to make better decisions as Antares scales. This is an ideal opportunity for someone with a strong foundation in investment banking, investing, or strategic finance who wants to move closer to the operating side of a rapidly growing hard-tech company.   Roles and Responsibilities: - Own and continuously improve Antares' long-range financial model, including integrated income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, and operating forecasts - Build financial models supporting major strategic decisions across manufacturing, reactor deployments, pricing, capital investment, and company growth - Develop and maintain reactor unit economics, cost curves, margin analysis, and production scaling models - Evaluate government and commercial contracts, including program economics, milestone structures, profitability, cash requirements, and return profiles - Support annual planning, forecasting, cash management, runway analysis, and capital allocation - Partner with engineering, manufacturing, nuclear, operations, and business development teams to - Analyze CapEx investments, manufacturing capacity, make-vs-buy decisions, and other operational investments - Build analyses and materials for the Board of Directors, investors, lenders, and other strategic partners - Support commercial strategy through pricing analysis, market sizing, customer economics, and project-level financial modeling - Perform competitive, industry, and market analysis across advanced nuclear, energy, defense, and adjacent markets - Develop reporting and decision-making tools that provide leadership with greater visibility into company performance - Take on high-priority strategic projects directly for the Head of Finance and executive team   Basic Qualifications: - 5+ years of relevant experience across investment banking, private equity/growth investing, strategic finance, corporate finance, or a high-growth operating company - Exceptional financial modeling and analytical skills with the ability to build complex models from the ground up   Preferred Skills & Experience: - Investment banking experience strongly preferred; experience subsequently working in an operating finance role is a plus - Strong understanding of financial statements, valuation, corporate finance, and investment analysis - Ability to take ambiguous business questions, structure the problem, perform the analysis, and communicate a clear recommendation - Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present financial concepts to both financial and non-financial audiences - High attention to detail without losing sight of the larger strategic question - Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities can change quickly - Highly proficient in Excel and financial modeling. - Experience in aerospace & defense, energy, infrastructure, industrials, manufacturing, or another hard-tech industry - Experience with project finance, infrastructure finance, or complex capital-intensive businesses - Experience evaluating government contracts or working with government customers - Experience with manufacturing cost structures and unit economics - Familiarity with energy markets, power generation, or nuclear energy   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” - Go Where the Work Is - Never miss a chance to meet a customer, user, or stakeholder face to face, even if that means hopping on a plane. If you can’t make it, find a teammate who can channel your intentions and go in your place. Deep work can be done from anywhere, but we believe teams are built in person, and aim to maximize our time together - Operate in the Grey - Embrace nuance in pursuit of truth. Question every fundamental assumption Equal Opportunity Antares is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, competence, and qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. 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 https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id=24d528fddbfc930044f9ff621f961987.