Equipment 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. About the Role As an Equipment Reliability Engineer, you will own the systems and technical work required to keep critical manufacturing equipment safe, available, and capable. You will work directly with CNC machining tools and other production assets, lead difficult breakdown repairs, establish preventive and predictive maintenance, build the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) from the ground up, and ensure new equipment is commissioned with a complete operational and maintenance handoff. The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on equipment knowledge with disciplined reliability engineering and practical project management. This person is comfortable working at the machine during a breakdown, translating failure history into an actionable reliability plan, coordinating vendors and internal teams, and building scalable maintenance processes in a fast moving manufacturing environment. Roles & Responsibilities: - Develop and execute the site equipment reliability roadmap for CNC machine tools and other critical manufacturing assets, balancing safety, quality, uptime, cost, and production risk. - Lead troubleshooting and breakdown repair for complex mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision-motion issues; coordinate OEM or specialist support when required. - Create and optimize preventive and predictive maintenance plans using equipment criticality, OEM guidance, failure history, and condition data. - Build and administer the CMMS from scratch, including asset hierarchy, equipment records, PM libraries, work-order workflows, labor and downtime tracking, spare parts data, dashboards etc. - Establish and manage a critical spare parts inventory strategy based on equipment criticality, failure risk, part cost, supplier lead time, availability, and production impact; optimize stocking levels to balance equipment uptime with inventory carrying cost. - Facilitate root cause analysis and corrective action for chronic or high-impact failures using structured methods such as 5 Whys, fault-tree analysis, and FMEA; verify that corrective actions are sustained. - Own equipment commissioning and maintenance readiness for new or relocated machines, including acceptance criteria, installation coordination, utility and safety checks, and handoff to operations. - Establish and report reliability metrics such as uptime, OEE inputs, PM compliance, planned-versus-reactive work, repeat failures, backlog health, and maintenance cost. - Manage improvement projects from scope through closeout, coordinating schedules, budgets, vendors, parts, risk, change control, and stakeholder communication while supporting urgent production needs. Basic Qualifications: - Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, electrical, manufacturing, industrial, mechatronics engineering or a related technical field AND 3+ years of hands-on equipment reliability, industrial maintenance, manufacturing equipment, or commissioning experience; - OR 8+ years of progressively responsible industrial maintenance or equipment reliability experience, including substantial work with CNC machine tools and automated production equipment. Preferred Skills and Experience: - Demonstrated ability to diagnose and repair CNC machine tools or comparable complex production equipment across mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision systems. - Experience designing and implementing a CMMS program from a blank system through asset loading, PM deployment, work management, reporting, and adoption. - Strong knowledge of preventive and predictive maintenance, equipment criticality, spare-parts strategy, root-cause analysis, FMEA, and reliability performance metrics. - Experience commissioning CNC equipment, automated manufacturing systems, or other capital assets, including factory or site acceptance, installation, validation, training, and maintenance handoff. - Project management experience leading equipment upgrades, relocations, overhauls, maintenance shutdowns, or reliability improvements with cross-functional teams and external vendors. - Clear technical documentation and communication skills, with the ability to train technicians, influence engineering and operations partners, and remain effective during high-pressure breakdowns. Additional Requirements: - Ability to support off-shift, weekend, or on-call work as necessary for breakdowns, commissioning, shutdowns, and critical production milestones. - Ability to work safely in an industrial environment and travel up to 10% for equipment acceptance, vendor support, training, or project needs. 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.