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Helion is a fusion power company based in Everett, WA, on a mission to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant. The company has raised $1.5 billion from leading investors including Sam Altman, SoftBank, and Thrive Capital. Helion's prototype, Polaris, has achieved record-breaking plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, and the company is advancing toward Orion, its planned commercial fusion power plant.
You will lead the teams responsible for maintaining, repairing, and upgrading Helion's experimental and large-scale fusion machines. Reporting to the Senior Manager of R&D, you will manage maintenance engineers and shift managers for AM and PM technician teams. Your core responsibilities include owning the machine maintenance and work-control program from intake through execution, verification, testing, closeout, and return to service. You will partner with Operations to prioritize repairs, preventive maintenance, upgrades, and integration work, developing executable work packages and managing maintenance schedules, resources, spares, vendors, and contractor support.
You will lead, coach, and develop your team, building effective coverage, shift handoffs, onboarding, and qualification programs. You will champion a strong safety culture by reinforcing stop-work authority and ensuring effective pre-job briefs, energy controls, work permits, configuration management, and management of change. You will build a data-driven preventive maintenance and reliability program using equipment history, failure analysis, and performance metrics to reduce recurring issues and improve machine availability. You will also oversee machine upgrades and integration readiness from scope and resource planning through installation, commissioning, and operational turnover, ensuring new hardware is safe, testable, maintainable, and scalable across multiple experimental machines.
This is an onsite role in Everett, WA, in a fast-paced, high-stakes experimental environment where you will tackle real-world challenges with a team that values urgency, rigor, ownership, and delivering hard truths.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 2+ years of people-management experience, including leading technicians, engineers, supervisors, or technical leads while building effective coordination across shifts
- 5+ years in maintenance, engineering, or operations within a complex, fast-paced, or high-growth operating facility
- Demonstrated ability to translate changing operational priorities and requests from multiple teams into realistic work plans, including equipment modifications and upgrades
- Hands-on understanding of hardware installation, testing, maintenance, repair, and commissioning, with the ability to read technical drawings and evaluate technical work plans
- Working knowledge of work authorization, lockout/tagout, work permits, configuration management, management of change, and return-to-service requirements for equipment with significant stored energy
- Experience managing preventive maintenance, equipment reliability, and structured failure investigations using a computerized maintenance management system, with the ability to surface risks and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly
- Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related technical field
