SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Helion is a fusion power company on a mission to build the world's first fusion power plant and enable unlimited clean electricity. 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 team is advancing toward Orion, the world's first fusion power plant.
In this Senior Data Scientist role, you will develop the data and knowledge foundation that enables engineers to understand, operate, and improve Helion's fusion systems. You will work directly with engineers, scientists, and control room operators to transform complex experimental and operational data—including machine telemetry, experimental results, and engineering workflows—into structured datasets, knowledge systems, and AI-enabled tools that support analysis and decision-making.
Key responsibilities include:
- Analyzing real-time and historical system data to provide control room operators with actionable insights, improve operational decision-making, and accelerate root-cause and performance analysis
- Developing data schemas, ontologies, and metadata frameworks to organize and standardize complex technical information
- Prototyping decision-support tools for anomaly detection, experiment comparison, and operational reporting
- Defining metrics and evaluation frameworks to ensure effectiveness, reliability, and business impact of statistical models and AI solutions
- Collaborating with the enterprise software engineering team to build and evaluate AI-powered workflows, including retrieval, summarization, and anomaly analysis systems using operational data
- Partnering across Software Engineering and Data Science teams to evolve and maintain data pipelines that transform and integrate diverse data sources into analytics-ready datasets
This is an onsite role reporting directly to the R&D Manager at Helion's Everett, WA office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of experience applying statistics, data science, and quantitative methods to complex hardware, physics, or engineering data
- Experience analyzing operational, experimental, and time-series data to identify trends, diagnose hardware behavior, uncover anomalies, and inform engineering decisions (preferred)
- Ability to translate ambiguous problems into practical, scalable solutions and partner effectively with engineers and scientists
- Proficiency in Python and modern data science tooling, with experience building data pipelines, analytics infrastructure, or production data systems
- Experience developing structured representations of information, including data models, schemas, metadata frameworks, or ontologies
- Familiarity with LLM APIs and applied AI techniques such as RAG, embeddings, semantic search, and AI-powered workflow automation
