Senior Structural Analyst - Space

About this role

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 a Space Structural Analyst at Antares, you will own structural analysis and dynamics for space nuclear systems, including reactor, spacecraft, radiator, payload, and associated support hardware. This role combines stress analysis, structural dynamics, test planning, and hands-on development support for first-of-a-kind space and lunar reactor programs. You' ll work closely with mechanical design, thermal, reactor, manufacturing, test, and systems engineering teams to guide structural architectures from early concept through detailed design, qualification-relevant testing, and integrated hardware development. You will perform first-order analysis, build detailed finite element models, support structural design decisions, derive launch and test loads, and own the analysis-to-test loop for vibration, modal, acoustic, and coupled structural environments.

The ideal candidate has strong fundamentals in stress, stiffness, dynamics, and finite element analysis, and can move fluidly between hand calculations, detailed FEMs, design trades, and test execution. This role requires practical engineering judgment, comfort with incomplete requirements, and the ability to define credible structural paths for hardware that must survive launch, space environments, thermal gradients, and nuclear-system integration constraints.

Role and Responsibilities

- Own stress analysis and structural dynamics for space nuclear hardware, including component, assembly, subsystem, and integrated vehicle-level structures.

- Support mechanical design and perform targeted structural design work for brackets, panels, reactor support structures, radiator structures, payload interfaces, test fixtures, and flight-like development hardware.

- Perform first-order hand calculations and rapid analytical assessments for stress, stiffness, margin, load paths, bolted joints, welds, bonded joints, fasteners, interfaces, and structural stability.

- Build, correlate, and maintain finite element models at the component, assembly, subsystem, and integrated system level.

- Run detailed structural analyses, including static strength, stiffness, modal, random vibration, acoustic, coupled loads, thermal stress, CTE mismatch, fatigue, and shock-related assessments.

- Support coupled thermal-structural analysis for space nuclear systems, including thermal stress, gradients, interface distortion, alignment effects, and thermomechanical compatibility between dissimilar materials.

- Define structural analysis plans, load cases, boundary conditions, assumptions, margins, and verification approaches for flight and development hardware.

- Develop plans for launch loads derivation, test loads definition, qualification strategy, acceptance testing, and structural verification.

- Work with systems and vehicle teams to interpret launch provider environments, derive subsystem-level loads, and flow loads into design and test requirements.

- Specify vibration, modal, acoustic, and structural development tests for components, assemblies, and subsystems.

- Own vibration test planning and execution, including fixture design, instrumentation planning, test article preparation, test procedure development, data review, anomaly resolution, and post-test correlation.

- Support procurement, commissioning, and operation of in-house vibration test capability, including vibe table requirements, facility integration, test safety, instrumentation, and operating procedures.

- Participate in design reviews, test readiness reviews, failure reviews, and customer-facing technical reviews, clearly communicating structural risks, margins, model assumptions, and verification status.

- Drive root-cause investigations for structural failures, test anomalies, model-test correlation gaps, and hardware nonconformances.

- Develop reusable analysis methods, templates, and workflows that improve structural design speed, consistency, and technical rigor across Antares space nuclear programs.

Basic Qualifications

- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Civil/Structural Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, or a related technical discipline.

- 5+ years of experience in structural analysis, stress analysis, structural dynamics, aerospace structures, spacecraft hardware, launch vehicle hardware, mechanical systems, or a related field.

- Strong fundamentals in solid mechanics, strength of materials, structural dynamics, vibration, fatigue, bolted joints, load paths, stiffness, and stability.

- Experience building and running finite element models for complex mechanical or aerospace hardware.

- Experience analyzing static loads, modal response, random vibration, acoustic environments, fatigue, thermal stress, or coupled structural loads.

Preferred Skills & Experience

- Master’s degree or higher in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Structural Dynamics, or a related field.

- Experience with spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, payloads, space mechanisms, defense systems, nuclear systems,…