Nuclear Systems Engineer

Ocean Atomics • Bethesda, MD

2d • $110,000 - $240,000

About The Position

Ocean Atomics (OA) is an American company designing, licensing, and assembling a standardized nuclear electric power plant and the surrounding support systems for maritime applications. We will install these plants on any vessel built to our nuclear-ready standards, and will provide end-to-end sustainment in our planned nuclear lifecycle dockyard. We will help develop the licensed operators to unlock this new capability for your energy intensive application at sea. To move fast and to lead the creation of this new market, we are leveraging the compact, proven systems enabled by water-cooled reactors.

Our mission
Scale nuclear energy. Power generations.

Our vision
A maritime commons thriving with abundant, economical, modern, and safe nuclear-powered activity — built, serviced, and staffed by re-industrialized American shipyards and people.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Nuclear, Mechanical, or related engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Direct experience with a reactor or comparable complex thermal/energy system, from concept through detailed design — not just analysis of a system someone else designed.
• Systems engineering fundamentals: requirements, interfaces, verification & validation, configuration control, margin management.
• Working fluency across nuclear, thermal-fluids, and mechanical domains, enough to challenge each specialty without owning their analyses.
• L1-L2: Early-career engineers with systems engineering exposure through internships, research, or early-career roles on reactor or complex energy systems.
• L3-L4: Have taken a reactor system (naval propulsion, microreactor, SMR, or research reactor) from concept through detailed design, and can own an integrated design baseline across disciplines.

Nice To Haves

• Naval reactors (NR) experience.
• Shipboard or offshore systems exposure.
• Licensing experience with the NRC or a maritime classification society (ABS, LR, etc.).

Responsibilities

• Support architecture and integration of primary and secondary reactor systems — core, primary loop, power conversion, shielding, auxiliaries, and I&C — across concept, preliminary, detailed, and final design phases.
• Contribute to concept selection and trade studies, and help allocate requirements to discipline owners.
• Coordinate with nuclear, thermal-hydraulic/fluids, mechanical, structural, and controls engineers to resolve interfaces and close integration gaps.
• Maintain system requirements, interface control documents, margins, and master block diagrams; participate in design reviews and phase gates.
• Partner with safety, licensing, and naval architecture engineers to keep designs compatible with the regulatory pathway and host vessel constraints (mass, volume, motion, shock, marine environment).
• Own the integrated design baseline and lead architecture decisions across primary and secondary systems (at L3-L4).
• Drive concept selection and trade studies, and allocate requirements down to discipline owners (at L3-L4).
• Run design reviews and phase gates, and surface the trade-offs that need executive decisions (at L3-L4).
• Track risk and manage technical debt across disciplines at the system level (at L3-L4).

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level