The RoleValar Atomics is developing high temperature gas cooled small modular reactors from first principles spanning early R&D through licensing, construction, and commissioning. The Lead OT engineer for fuel will own the SCADA/OT function supporting the reactor and its shared balance-of-plant interfaces. This role sits at the intersection of deep engineering and program leadership: you will build and lead the fuel labs OT team while remaining a hands-on technical authority shaping design decisions, safety system philosophy, and regulatory strategy.
This scope includes industrial networking, compute/virtualization, storage, identity/access management, engineering workstations, HMI infrastructure, historians, operational data systems, cybersecurity boundaries, server room design, and the software/licensing required to keep these systems available, reliable, maintainable, and secure.
You will work closely with IC&E, Operations, Mechanical Engineering, Health Physics, Construction, Quality, and the broader SCADA & OT organization. The OT team owns the communications, infrastructure, software, data, identity, and cybersecurity environment required to engineer, operate, monitor, and maintain those systems. IC&E owns field instrumentation, PLC application programming, protection logic, and electrical/control hardware.
We expect most candidates to come from oil & gas, power generation, or advanced industrial sectors. Nuclear experience is valued but not required; what matters is your ability to apply rigorous engineering discipline to first-of-a-kind systems and grow into the nuclear regulatory environment with us.
Key Responsibilities - Own the fuel lab OT strategy, architecture, roadmap, schedule, and delivery from design through commissioning/operations.
- Build, hire, lead, and grow a multidisciplinary OT engineering team capable of supporting multiple reactor programs.
- Establish technical requirements, system boundaries, design standards, interface definitions, and acceptance criteria across infrastructure/networking/SCADA/data/cybersecurity.
- Maintain technical authority over reactor SCADA/OT while remaining hands-on during early design, integration, troubleshooting, and commissioning.
- Lead design reviews, procurement, vendor selection, integration, verification/validation, commissioning, turnover, and operational readiness.
- Own technical interfaces with IC&E/Operations/Mechanical Engineering/Health Physics/Construction/Quality.
- Define configuration management, change control, documentation, cybersecurity, recovery, and lifecycle practices for reactor SCADA/OT systems.
- Manage vendors/contractors/systems integrators, including scopes of work, technical deliverables, schedules, acceptance criteria, and escalation.
- Communicate technical status, staffing needs, program risks, and required decisions clearly to engineering/company leadership.
You Will Be Successful in This Role If - You take complete ownership of broad technical scope and can deliver before a large team or mature organization exists.
- You can move between organizational leadership, system architecture, design review, field execution, and hands-on troubleshooting.
- You know how to hire strong engineers, define clear ownership, develop technical leaders, and scale a team without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
- You can distinguish between work that must be performed internally and work that can be delegated to vendors/contractors.
- You make practical engineering decisions under ambiguity without compromising safety, reliability, or configuration control.
- You create clear requirements, diagrams, procedures, and technical direction that engineers/vendors can execute against.
- You are comfortable working in a fast-moving, first-of-a-kind environment with changing priorities and aggressive schedules.
- You are willing to maintain a strong field presence during construction, commissioning, startup, outages, and incident response.
Basic Qualifications - Demonstrated ownership of OT or industrial control infrastructure for a complex industrial, power-generation, manufacturing, chemical-processing, or similarly demanding facility.
- Experience hiring/managing/developing engineers and building a technical team or function.
- Strong working knowledge of industrial networking, compute/virtualization, storage, identity/PKI, historians/data systems, OT cybersecurity, and server room infrastructure.
- Experience leading systems through requirements/design/procurement/integration/commissioning/operations.
- Ability to review multidisciplinary engineering work, identify material technical risks, and make defensible architecture decisions.
- Experience translating technical/regulatory/quality/cybersecurity requirements into designs, acceptance criteria, and verification plans.
- Experience managing vendors/contractors/systems integrators and holding them accountable for technical quality/schedule/delivery.
- Strong technical writing/visualization skills, including requirements, architecture diagrams, design narratives, procedures, and executive-level communication.
- Formal degrees/certifications are not required. Equivalent technical experience is acceptable.
Preferred Skills and Experience - Experience in nuclear energy, conventional power generation, oil & gas, chemical processing, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, or other safety-critical industries.
- Experience delivering first-of-a-kind facilities, pilot plants, greenfield industrial sites, or major capital projects.
- Experience with Proxmox/Arista/Palo Alto/AVEVA PI/InfluxDB/SQL/Grafana/OPC UA or equivalent technologies.
- Experience with air-gapped environments, network segmentation, unidirectional data flows, and OT cybersecurity testing.
- Experience building an engineering organization from an initial hands-on leadership role into a larger multidisciplinary team.
- Direct experience with Rockwell FactoryTalk, including FactoryTalk View SE/Linx/Historian SE/AssetCentre.
What We Offer - Competitive base salary
- Equity ownership in a rapidly growing advanced energy company
- Comprehensive medical benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Free daily lunch and dinner provided onsite
- Generous PPE stipend
- High-impact startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy
- Opportunities for rapid career growth and internal advancement
- Direct collaboration with experienced operators, engineers, and industry leaders
- The opportunity to help build and scale transformative energy technology from the ground up
Salary$200,000-$275,000 USD
