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Helion is a fusion power company on a mission to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant. The company has raised $1.5 billion from top-tier investors including Sam Altman, SoftBank, and Thrive Capital. Their prototype, Polaris, has achieved record-breaking plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, and they are advancing toward their commercial plant, Orion.
You will lead and scale the Plant Control Software team, a multidisciplinary group responsible for the firmware, application software, networking, infrastructure, and cybersecurity that controls and monitors the fusion reactor. This is a mission-critical role: the fusion plant only produces useful results if software can control it, observe it, and make sense of the data. You will own delivery of the complete plant control software stack across embedded, supervisory, networking, and data layers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and growing a multidisciplinary team of firmware engineers, embedded engineers, application software engineers, and infrastructure specialists across multiple seniority levels
- Establishing engineering principles, processes, and practices that enable the team to excel: planning, code review, testing, deployment, fault response, and handoff to operations
- Partnering closely with electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, fuel cycle, systems engineering, operations, and science teams to deliver software against hardware on a shared schedule
- Holding technical direction and depth in real-time, embedded, and control software for physical systems
- Hiring and developing engineers over time
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years building complex control systems for hardware
- 3+ years in a leadership role building and managing a multidisciplinary software team
- Deep expertise in real-time, embedded, or control software for physical systems
- Track record of delivering software against hardware schedules in product-hardware environments
- Experience hiring and growing engineers
- Ability to work fluently across disciplinary boundaries with engineers and scientists
- Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)
This is a pivotal moment to join Helion. You will work with a team that values urgency, rigor, ownership, and hard truths—essential to achieving what no one has done before.
