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Helion is a fusion power company on a mission to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant. Founded in 2013 and backed by $1.5B in funding from investors including Sam Altman, Mithril, Capricorn, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed, and SoftBank, Helion has achieved record-breaking plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius with its Polaris prototype and is advancing toward its Orion power plant.
As Senior Systems Engineer, you will own the system architecture and top-level requirements that integrate Helion's fusion power plant as a coherent whole—spanning the fusion machine, balance of plant, and connecting systems. You will serve as the technical integration point across electrical, mechanical, controls, plant, science, and business teams.
Key responsibilities:
- Own and maintain top-level plant requirements with clear, traceable decomposition from mission objectives down to subsystem and component requirements
- Lead trade studies informing major plant architecture decisions and present technical rationale to engineering leadership
- Develop and own Interface Control Documents (ICDs) defining electrical, mechanical, controls, and data interfaces between subsystems and suppliers
- Lead design reviews (PDR/CDR-style) at the plant level, surfacing and dispositioning requirements, interfaces, and risks early
- Identify, assess, and track plant-level integration risks; drive mitigation strategies across functional teams
- Drive configuration management and change control for plant-level requirements, evaluating cross-system impact of design changes
- Partner with subsystem teams to ensure designs remain aligned with plant-level intent as they mature
- Drive technical consensus across functional teams and represent the plant's technical position in program and leadership reviews
- Scale Helion's systems engineering processes—requirements management, ICD control, design review cadence—to support growth from prototype to production power plants
This is an architecture- and requirements-focused role requiring strong cross-disciplinary collaboration without direct authority, operating in a fast-paced environment that values urgency, rigor, ownership, and hard truths.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field
- 8+ years of systems engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of requirements, architecture, or interface definition on complex plant or hardware systems
- Proven experience decomposing high-level plant or mission requirements into traceable, verifiable subsystem requirements
- Proven experience authoring and owning ICDs across multiple engineering disciplines
- Experience developing and executing verification and validation plans against system-level requirements
- Strong technical writing and communication skills; ability to influence design decisions across disciplines without direct authority
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus and decisions across cross-functional engineering teams
- Comfort working across electrical, mechanical, controls, science, business, and software domains without being deeply expert in all
- Demonstrated ability to operate in fast-paced development environments requiring both engineering rigor and speed
DESIRED:
- Experience in aerospace, nuclear, energy systems, or other complex, safety-critical, first-of-kind hardware or plant programs
- Experience with requirements management and PLM tooling (Jama, DOORS, Teamcenter, or similar)
- Experience with risk identification, tracking, and mitigation on complex engineering programs
- Experience applying system safety and reliability methods (FMEA, FMECA, fault tree analysis)
- Track record of mentoring engineers toward stronger systems engineering practice
