Environmental Lab Manager

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 Team: We are looking for a hands-on Environmental Lab Manager to build and operate the environmental test capabilities supporting Antares’ R1 reactor and associated hardware. You will translate program needs into equipment and facility requirements, bring new capabilities online, and establish a practical path from test request to reliable results. You will work closely with Facilities, test teams, design engineering, and Quality to make the lab useful, safe, and ready for a growing hardware development program. Roles & Responsibilities: • Build the environmental lab capability roadmap with test and design teams, identifying near-term needs, future capacity, and gaps best covered by external labs. • Size and specify environmental chambers, electrodynamic shakers, and other test equipment based on hardware dimensions, mass, mounting, thermal loads, operating conditions, test profiles, and expected utilization. • For chambers, evaluate usable volume, temperature and humidity ranges, ramp rates under load, feedthroughs, and heat removal. For shakers, evaluate payload and fixture mass, force, frequency, displacement, velocity, and control requirements. • Work with Facilities to define and coordinate power, cooling water, ventilation, compressed air, floor loading, vibration isolation, rigging access, and equipment layout before installation. • Own technical vendor evaluations and equipment acceptance requirements; coordinate procurement, installation, commissioning, and verification of usable test capability. • Work with design engineering, test teams, and Quality to identify applicable test specifications and methods, tailor profiles to the intended environment, and document acceptance criteria and the basis for test severity. • Establish procedures for test readiness, fixture and sensor checks, equipment operation, abort limits, data review, and test reporting. Keep documentation proportional to test risk and program needs. • Coordinate and support hands-on test execution, including fixtures, instrumentation, data acquisition, and troubleshooting; maintain traceability from requested conditions to recorded results. • Own equipment maintenance, calibration, operator training, configuration records, and lab safety practices in coordination with Facilities, EHS, and Quality. • Track lab capacity, equipment availability, and upcoming demand; recommend capability investments and external test support as the program grows. • As lab demand grows, hire, train, and manage technicians to support test execution and lab operations. Team building will become a priority as the workload warrants; the initial focus will be establishing equipment capabilities and lab operations. Basic Qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, electrical, aerospace, or a related engineering field, or 7+ years of equivalent practical experience. • Demonstrated experience owning environmental test equipment or lab operations, including thermal, vibration, or shock testing. • Experience translating hardware and test requirements into equipment specifications, evaluating vendors, and bringing new equipment into service. • Ability to assess equipment limits and facility needs and explain the tradeoffs behind equipment selection. • Experience developing test procedures, working with instrumentation and data acquisition, troubleshooting test setups, and reviewing test results. • Ability to turn incomplete requests into clear test objectives, required inputs, execution plans, and actionable results. • Demonstrated ownership across engineering, Facilities, vendors, and technicians, with sound judgment on safety, schedule, and test quality. Preferred Skills and Experience: • Experience establishing or expanding a lab, including capital planning, equipment commissioning, and operator training. • Working familiarity with environmental test frameworks such as MIL-STD-810 or IEC 60068, and experience selecting and tailoring methods to actual hardware environments. • Experience with electrodynamic shaker controllers, vibration fixtures, accelerometers, resonance surveys, and control or response limiting. • Experience with thermal, humidity, thermal cycling, or thermal vacuum equipment and testing hardware that dissipates significant heat. • Experience building scheduling, readiness, reporting, maintenance, and calibration processes in a growing organization. • Experience supporting aerospace, defense, energy, or other hardware programs with formal qualification and traceability expectations. • Experience hiring, training, and managing technicians, including recognizing when lab demand warrants additional staffing. Additional Requirements: • Work on site in Torrance, CA, with regular hands-on involvement in lab setup, commissioning, and testing. • Coordinate occasional vendor or external lab visits as needed. 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.