Staff Mission 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.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Los Alamos, Idaho, and Oak Ridge. Antares has raised over $130M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $13M in government funding.

About the Team

As a Space Mission Manager, you will own the integrated development plan for Antares’ space and off-world reactor programs, spanning DoD, NASA, and adjacent government customers. You will translate mission objectives, contract requirements, and customer milestones into a coherent, executable internal plan—one that accounts for engineering dependencies, test requirements, procurement constraints, and safety milestones across a highly interdisciplinary team.

This is a technical leadership role that requires genuine engagement with engineering decisions. The right person for this job can read a schedule and know what’s actually at risk, ask the question that surfaces a missing dependency before it becomes a slip, and hold a room of engineers and government customers accountable to the same plan. If you thrive at the intersection of rigorous technical execution and complex stakeholder environments, and you want your work to matter at a historic scale, this role is for you.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Build and own the integrated internal development schedule for space and off-world (e.g., lunar) reactor programs, including engineering design, procurement, manufacturing, integration, test, analysis, safety, and customer deliverables.

• Build and maintain a program plan that runs parallel to external DoD, NASA, and government-funded efforts, ingesting customer milestones while identifying the additional internal work required to successfully build, integrate, and test a space reactor.

• Translate mission objectives, contract deliverables, technical requirements, and customer milestones into executable internal plans with clear owners, dependencies, dates, risks, and decision points.

• Drive cross-functional program execution across reactor engineering, thermal systems, electrical systems, structures, manufacturing, test, safety, licensing, quality, supply chain, and business development.

• Identify critical-path activities, schedule risk, resource constraints, technical blockers, and dependency gaps; escalate issues early and drive mitigation plans to closure.

• Coordinate build, integration, and test planning for space reactor development hardware, including development units, pathfinders, engineering test articles, qualification-relevant builds, and integrated system tests.

• Integrate test campaigns into the development schedule, including component testing, subsystem testing, environmental testing, thermal testing, nuclear-adjacent testing, and full-system integration activities.

• Establish program operating rhythms, including schedule reviews, technical reviews, risk reviews, test readiness reviews, integration readiness reviews, and customer-facing milestone reviews.

• Partner with systems engineering to ensure requirements, interfaces, verification plans, and program schedules remain synchronized as designs evolve.

• Work with engineering leads to define the minimum viable set of analyses, hardware builds, and tests required to retire key technical risks for space nuclear systems.

• Track program risks, actions, decisions, assumptions, and open technical issues; ensure they are visible, owned, and actively managed.

• Prepare clear internal and external program materials, including milestone plans, development roadmaps, customer briefings, schedule status, technical progress summaries, and risk-burn-down updates.

• Support government customer engagement by helping communicate program status, technical progress, schedule impacts, and development logic to DoD, NASA, DOE, and other mission stakeholders.

• Support proposal and new program shaping by developing credible execution plans, technical schedules, milestone structures, test plans, and resource estimates.

• Help Antares mature its program management systems, development planning processes, and execution discipline for first-of-a-kind space nuclear hardware.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, physics, or a related technical discipline.

• 5+ years of experience in technical program management, systems engineering, or hardware development in aerospace, defense, nuclear, or a related technically demanding field.

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Master’s degree in aerospace engineering, systems engineering, nuclear engineering, physics, or a related technical field.

• Prior experience with space systems, spacecraft payloads, launch vehicles, power systems, or other high-reliability aerospace hardware.

• Familiarity with space nuclear power or propulsion systems, including fission surface power, nuclear thermal or electric propulsion, heat rejection, radiation environments, or nuclear safety.

• Hands-on experience building integrated master schedules, test matrices, verification plans, risk registers, and dependency maps for hardware programs.

• Experience leading or coordinating build, integration, and test campaigns for complex hardware in aerospace, defense, or energy.

• Familiarity with standard design and readiness review structures (SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, IRR, ORR, FRR, or equivalent) and the program planning discipline that supports them.

• Experience managing against external customer milestones while maintaining a parallel internal risk-reduction and technology-maturation plan.

• Working knowledge of systems engineering processes: requirements management, interface control, verification planning, and mission assurance.

• Experience developing or contributing to government proposals, statements of work, basis-of-estimate materials, or program execution plans.

• PMP certification or equivalent systems engineering or program leadership credential.

• Experience managing full-lifecycle hardware development schedules—from design through procurement, manufacturing, integration, test, and customer delivery.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate schedule logic, technical dependencies, and program risk into clear briefings for engineering and executive audiences alike.

• Comfortable building plans from incomplete information and iterating as technical understanding matures—the early-stage environment here demands structured thinking, not waiting for certainty.

• Prior experience working within or directly supporting DoD, NASA, DOE, USSF, DARPA, AFRL, or a national laboratory program.

• Strong grasp of hardware development lifecycles: requirements flow-down, design reviews, build planning, integration sequencing, test readiness, and verification closure.

• Track record of working across multiple technical disciplines and distilling engineering complexity into program plans, decision points, and risk narratives that drive action.

Additional Requirements:

• Active or prior security clearance, or ability to obtain a Top Secret or TS/SCI clearance.

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.

Salary Ranges:

Mission Manager II - $112,000 - $150,00

Senior Mission Manager - $140,000 - $185,000

Salary is determined based on skills assessment during the interview

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.