Senior-Staff Embedded Software 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, 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 seeking a Senior or Staff Embedded Software Engineer to build the real-time software that operates and tests our first-of-a-kind microreactor hardware. This software sits between custom electronics and reactor control infrastructure, translating sensor data, commands, timing requirements, diagnostics, and fault responses into reliable embedded behavior. Your primary focus will be end-to-end ownership of embedded software systems across the full software lifecycle. You will drive projects from conceptual design and requirements definition through technical design, verification and validation planning, implementation, validation and integration, operational readiness, deployment, and ongoing operations and maintenance. You will partner with firmware engineers on board bring-up, device drivers, bootloaders, and hardware integration. You will also work across electrical, controls, reactor software, systems, safety, and test teams to turn evolving requirements into dependable, testable software. You should be comfortable defining boundaries with hardware-facing software and supporting system-level debugging. This is a hands-on software role. You will write production C/C++, integrate hardware-facing components, debug system-level issues, participate in integration and qualification testing, and provide technical guidance to other engineers. Key Responsibilities • Own the full lifecycle of real-time embedded software projects for reactor and test hardware, defining the technical approach, execution plan, risks, and verification strategy. • Collaborate with electrical, controls, reactor software, systems, safety, and test teams to define and document software requirements, resolve interfaces and risks, and translate system needs into software architecture and testable, observable behavior. • Define software boundaries and partition functionality among hardware-facing components, communication services, interrupts, real-time tasks, state machines, control functions, and application logic. • Integrate embedded software with custom electronics, hardware interfaces, and control algorithms. • Analyze failure modes and implement predictable fault handling and recovery behavior. • Support hardware integration, qualification, and reactor test campaigns, including cross-disciplinary debugging in the lab. • Develop and review software designs, interface definitions, test plans, verification procedures, and release documentation. • Lead design and code reviews, establish embedded software best practices, and mentor more junior engineers. Basic Qualifications • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field. • Experience working with microcontrollers, bare-metal systems, an RTOS, or similarly constrained real-time platforms. • Experience designing embedded software components, interfaces, state machines, and task structures, with a strong understanding of interrupts, scheduling, concurrency, data ownership, timing constraints, and resource limitations. • Working knowledge of common embedded communication interfaces such as SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, or RS-485, sufficient to define hardware-facing interfaces and support system integration. • Strong debugging skills across component and system boundaries using logs, traces, source-level debuggers, or other appropriate tools. • Experience developing testable embedded software and supporting unit, integration, simulation, or hardware-in-the-loop testing. • Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical designs and communicate effectively across electrical, controls, software, systems, safety, and test teams. Preferred Skills and Experience • Experience in regulated, mission-critical, or safety-critical industries such as nuclear, aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial controls, or medical devices. • Experience designing redundant or fault-tolerant systems, including degraded operating modes, safe states, fault containment, and recovery. • Hands-on experience with board bring-up, device-driver development, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, or similar laboratory equipment. • Experience with bootloaders, remote firmware updates, rollback, or recovery mechanisms. • Experience developing or integrating automated software-in-the-loop, hardware-in- the-loop, continuous integration, or fault-injection systems. • Familiarity with configuration-controlled development, requirements traceability, hazard analysis, verification planning, qualification, or relevant safety-critical development standards. Compensation: - Senior Embedded Software Engineer: $160,000-$210,000 - Staff Embedded Software Engineer: $195,000-$235,000 Location - We are located in Torrance, CA in a 322,000 square foot, brand new facility featuring large open spaces for team collaboration, R&D, and production, as well as easy access to the 405, 105, and 110 freeways. Our facility is in the heart of Los Angeles' vibrant emerging tech ecosystem alongside many other high growth startups and enterprises. 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.