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Antares is building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors for terrestrial, underwater, and space applications. The company's mission is to make clean energy abundant from Earth to the Asteroid Belt, with a team drawn from SpaceX, the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, MIT, and National Laboratories. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital and holds hundreds of millions in contracts with military services, NASA, and the Department of Energy.
As Equipment Reliability Engineer, you will own the systems and technical work to keep critical manufacturing equipment safe, available, and capable. You will work directly with CNC machining tools and other production assets, lead breakdown repairs, establish preventive and predictive maintenance programs, build a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) from the ground up, and ensure new equipment is commissioned with complete operational and maintenance handoff.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop and execute the site equipment reliability roadmap for CNC machine tools and critical manufacturing assets, balancing safety, quality, uptime, cost, and production risk.
- Lead troubleshooting and breakdown repair for complex mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision-motion issues; coordinate OEM or specialist support as needed.
- Create and optimize preventive and predictive maintenance plans using equipment criticality, OEM guidance, failure history, and condition data.
- Build and administer the CMMS from scratch, including asset hierarchy, equipment records, PM libraries, work-order workflows, labor and downtime tracking, spare parts data, and dashboards.
- Establish and manage critical spare parts inventory strategy based on equipment criticality, failure risk, part cost, supplier lead time, and production impact.
- Facilitate root cause analysis and corrective action for chronic or high-impact failures using 5 Whys, fault-tree analysis, and FMEA; verify sustained corrective actions.
- Own equipment commissioning and maintenance readiness for new or relocated machines, including acceptance criteria, installation coordination, utility and safety checks, and handoff to operations.
- Establish and report reliability metrics such as uptime, OEE inputs, PM compliance, planned-versus-reactive work, repeat failures, backlog health, and maintenance cost.
- Manage improvement projects from scope through closeout, coordinating schedules, budgets, vendors, parts, risk, change control, and stakeholder communication.
The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on equipment knowledge with disciplined reliability engineering and practical project management. You will be comfortable working at the machine during a breakdown, translating failure history into actionable reliability plans, coordinating vendors and internal teams, and building scalable maintenance processes in a fast-moving manufacturing environment.
Ability to support off-shift, weekend, or on-call work as necessary for breakdowns, commissioning, shutdowns, and critical production milestones. Ability to work safely in an industrial environment and travel up to 10% for equipment acceptance, vendor support, training, or project needs.
IMPORTANT: This role requires U.S. citizenship or national status, U.S. lawful permanent residency (green card), Refugee status under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or Asylee status under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or eligibility to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State due to ITAR export control regulations.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in mechanical, electrical, manufacturing, industrial, mechatronics engineering, or related technical field AND 3+ years of hands-on equipment reliability, industrial maintenance, manufacturing equipment, or commissioning experience; OR 8+ years of progressively responsible industrial maintenance or equipment reliability experience, including substantial work with CNC machine tools and automated production equipment.
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose and repair CNC machine tools or comparable complex production equipment across mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision systems.
- Experience designing and implementing a CMMS program from blank system through asset loading, PM deployment, work management, reporting, and adoption.
- Strong knowledge of preventive and predictive maintenance, equipment criticality, spare-parts strategy, root-cause analysis, FMEA, and reliability performance metrics.
- Experience commissioning CNC equipment, automated manufacturing systems, or other capital assets, including factory or site acceptance, installation, validation, training, and maintenance handoff.
- Project management experience leading equipment upgrades, relocations, overhauls, maintenance shutdowns, or reliability improvements with cross-functional teams and external vendors.
- Clear technical documentation and communication skills, with ability to train technicians, influence engineering and operations partners, and remain effective during high-pressure breakdowns.
