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Valar Atomics is developing advanced nuclear energy systems to enable scalable, clean, high-temperature power for industrial applications, hydrogen production, and next-generation manufacturing. The company is building factory-made, rapidly deployable reactor systems with a pilot plant planned for Orangeville, Utah.
The Staff CFD Analysis Engineer owns the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workstream for reactor internals and balance-of-plant systems. This is a senior technical role within the Models & Simulations Engineering Group, responsible for developing and executing high-fidelity CFD and thermal-hydraulic simulations that underpin safety, performance, and regulatory licensing of advanced reactor systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Planning and performing high-fidelity CFD and conjugate heat-transfer analyses in ANSYS Fluent for reactor thermal-hydraulics, including geometry preparation, meshing, turbulence-model selection, solver setup, and convergence assessment
- Establishing and documenting verification and validation (V&V) basis per ASME V&V 20, including mesh-convergence studies and benchmarking against test data
- Providing boundary conditions across engineering streams: heat-transfer coefficients to thermal-fluid systems, power distributions to neutronics, and thermal/pressure loads to structural FEA
- Leading technical problem definition, performing independent review of analyses, and producing analysis reports meeting NQA-1 and 10 CFR 50 Appendix B documentation standards
- Interfacing with thermal-fluid systems, structural, and neutronics teams to build coupled multiphysics workflows
- Leading technical reviews, setting CFD modeling standards and best practices, and mentoring mid-level and junior analysts
- Supporting regulator and customer technical interactions
- Developing CFD methods, templates, and standardized approaches; supporting project scoping and scheduling
Required: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Aerospace, Nuclear Engineering, or related field; 8+ years of production-grade CFD analysis experience.
Preferred: Master's degree; strong background in turbulence modeling (RANS k-ε/k-ω SST, LES/DES); expertise in conjugate heat transfer, multiphase and species transport; demonstrated V&V practices in regulated environments.
