Staff-Principal Reliability 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. Roles & Responsibilities: - Own quantitative reliability analysis for the Antares R1 microreactor, including development and maintenance of reactor and plant level reliability, availability, and capacity factor models. - Establish reliability targets for reactor systems, subsystems, and critical components based on overall plant capacity factor, regulatory and mission requirements. - Translate top-level reactor availability and capacity factor goals into measurable reliability requirements for individual mechanical, electrical, controls, thermal, and balance-of-plant systems. - Develop and maintain reliability block diagrams, fault trees, failure mode analyses, and other quantitative models used to understand how component and subsystem failures affect overall reactor performance and availability. - Calculate and track key reliability metrics including failure rates, MTBF, MTTR, availability, probability of mission success, component life, and expected contribution to reactor downtime. - Identify the components and failure modes that have the greatest impact on reactor capacity factor and lead focused improvement efforts to reduce those risks. - Work directly with mechanical, electrical, controls, manufacturing, test, and reactor systems engineers to develop reliability improvement plans for the lowest-performing or highest-risk portions of the design. - Evaluate design alternatives and architecture trades based on their impact to reliability, redundancy, maintainability, serviceability, and reactor capacity factor. - Perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to determine which assumptions, failure rates, repair times, and component behaviors most strongly influence predicted reactor availability. - Develop reliability predictions using component test data, supplier data, industry databases, accelerated life testing, engineering analysis, and field experience. - Establish statistically sound methods for converting development and qualification test results into reliability estimates and confidence bounds. - Define reliability demonstration and qualification test strategies, including sample sizes, test durations, failure criteria, confidence levels, and statistical acceptance methods. - Use operational, manufacturing, inspection, and test data to continuously update reliability models and improve predictions as the reactor design matures. - Lead or support DFMEA, FMEA, FMECA, fault tree analysis, and related structured failure-mode investigations across reactor systems. - Partner with design teams early in the development process to identify single-point failures, wear-out mechanisms, common-cause vulnerabilities, inadequate redundancy, difficult-to-maintain components, and other reliability risks before designs are released. - Evaluate component degradation and life-limiting mechanisms including fatigue, creep, wear, corrosion, thermal cycling, radiation exposure, electrical degradation, and environmental effects as applicable to the reactor design. - Develop reliability growth plans for systems that do not initially meet program targets and track progress toward demonstrated reliability objectives. - Support decisions regarding redundancy, sparing, preventative maintenance, inspection intervals, replacement intervals, and repair strategies based on quantitative reliability and availability analysis. - Work with operations and deployment teams to understand expected maintenance and repair activities and accurately incorporate those activities into reactor availability and capacity factor predictions. - Establish clear reliability dashboards, metrics, and technical reviews that allow engineering leadership to understand the major drivers of reactor downtime and where engineering effort should be focused. - Communicate reliability risks and recommendations clearly to engineers and program leadership, including the quantitative impact of proposed design or operational changes on overall reactor performance. - Serve as a technical authority for reliability engineering methods and help establish Antares' internal standards, tools, processes, and best practices for designing highly reliable reactor systems. - Drive a culture in which reliability is treated as a design requirement and continuously improved through analysis, testing, manufacturing data, and operational learning rather than evaluated only after hardware is complete. Basic Qualifications: - Bachelor’s degree in engineering, applied mathematics, physics, statistics, or a related technical field. - 8+ years of experience performing reliability, root cause analysis, failure analysis, statistical analysis, or similar quantitative engineering work on complex hardware systems. - Working knowledge of statistics, probability, failure modes, and reliability engineering fundamentals. - Ability to understand mechanical and electrical systems well enough to evaluate likely failure mechanisms and reliability risks. - Ability to analyze technical data, develop quantitative conclusions, and communicate recommendations to engineering teams. Preferred Skills and Experience: - Experience with reliability engineering in nuclear, aerospace, space, automotive, energy, defense, or other safety- or mission-critical hardware industries. - Experience with reliability block diagrams, fault trees, FMEA/FMECA, Weibull analysis, MTBF/MTTR, probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), availability modeling, or reliability growth methods. - Experience translating system-level availability or capacity factor targets into subsystem and component reliability requirements. - Experience with or understanding "risk informed component classification and knowledge with 10CFR50.69. - Familiarity with mechanical and electrical design, manufacturing processes, qualification testing, material capabilities/limitations, and common hardware failure mechanisms. - Experience using test, field, or production data to estimate failure rates and update reliability predictions. - Experience driving design changes or reliability improvement plans based on quantitative reliability analysis. - Familiarity with statistical tools or programming languages and relevant libraries used for engineering analysis, such as Python, MATLAB, Octave, R, Minitab, SAS, NCSS, or similar. Location - We are located in Torrance, CA in a 145,000 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.