Reactor Software Engineer Intern

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 Summer Internship Program

Internships at Antares are anything but ordinary. You'll work alongside our team as we design, build, and test fission microreactors built to deliver reliable energy for critical missions on Earth, in space, and underwater.

Our interns contribute to real work from day one. Depending on your role, you may touch hardware, write and test software, support manufacturing and operations, or help build the systems that allow Antares to move quickly as we scale. You'll work alongside engineers, operators, and other experts solving challenging problems—and you'll leave your internship with hands-on experience that's difficult to find anywhere else.

We work hard, move quickly, and take pride in what we're building. If you're excited to learn by doing and want to contribute to the next generation of nuclear energy, we'd love to have you join us next summer.

We will be running two separate cohorts to accommodate students on both semester and quarter schedules:

Cohort #1

Monday, May 17 – Friday, August 13

Cohort #2

Monday, June 14 – Friday, September 10

All internship roles are based at our Torrance headquarters and require interns to work onsite five days per week. We will not be considering candidates for remote or hybrid arrangements.

Interns will receive a relocation and housing stipend as part of their offer package.

About the Team

The Software team builds the software that enables Antares engineers to operate, test, and understand our reactor systems. The team works across embedded software, hardware interfaces, controls, telemetry, testing, and developer tools, connecting software with the physical hardware being designed and tested across Antares.

As a Software Engineering Intern, you will work on embedded software and the systems used to test, diagnose, and understand the behavior of Antares hardware. Your work will span software development, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and system telemetry, giving you hands-on exposure to the connection between software and physical systems.

Interns will be tasked with small starter projects, and then quickly tasked with a long-duration project that will culminate in a technical deliverable and presentation. You will be integrated and evaluated as if you are a first-year junior engineer, not just an “intern”. The bar for success here is high, and the expectation is that you’re able to smartly use your mentor and the resources around you to execute on your project and identify more issues and opportunities for improvement.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Support the development, debugging, and testing of embedded software, including hardware interfaces, diagnostic capabilities, automated testing, and development tools.

• Perform hands-on testing and validation of hardware-in-the-loop environments, executing test procedures and evaluating system behavior against expected results.

• Reproduce and investigate software and hardware-in-the-loop failures, document results, and help identify the source of unexpected system behavior.

• Improve test coverage and validation processes based on findings from hands-on system testing.

• Improve system telemetry from source to destination by instrumenting software components and routing and validating telemetry data.

• Integrate system signals into HMI and Grafana so system health and behavior are consistently available for monitoring and troubleshooting.

Basic Qualifications:

• Enrolled in at least a bachelor’s degree program, and going into your Junior or Senior year of studies

• Must have prior internship experience, or significant (>1yr) project team, laboratory, or research experience

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• GPA of 3.5 or above

• Experience developing, debugging, or testing embedded software

• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing or other hands-on software/hardware integration and validation

• Experience with software instrumentation, telemetry, or system monitoring

• Experience with HMI and/or Grafana

• Experience in a University club or organization, leadership role preferred

• Strong interpersonal and technical communication skills (examples: leading a student project team, presenting research at conferences, etc.)

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail

• Ability to work cross-departmentally with different groups and teams

• Ability to work effectively in a dynamic environment with changing needs and requirements

• Ability to work independently and in a team, take initiative, and communicate effectively

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.