About the job
Join Helion Energy in Revolutionizing Clean Energy
Helion is a pioneering fusion power company located in Everett, WA, dedicated to creating the world’s first fusion power plant and enabling a future of limitless clean electricity. Our vision is to provide clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone, reshaping the future of energy.
Since our establishment in 2013, we have garnered over $1 billion from esteemed investors including Sam Altman, Mithril, and Capricorn Investment Group, alongside new partners such as SoftBank and Lightspeed. Our latest prototype, Trenta, successfully completed 10,000 high-power pulses and achieved plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (9 keV). We are currently advancing with Polaris, our next prototype, as we strive towards our goal of establishing the world's first fusion power plant.
Now is an exciting time to become part of Helion. You will face real-world challenges alongside a team that values urgency, rigor, accountability, and a commitment to uncovering hard truths, principles critical to achieving unprecedented milestones. Together, we will transform the future of energy because the world cannot afford to wait.
Your Role and Responsibilities
As the Manager of Plant Control Engineering, you will cultivate and lead a multidisciplinary team that integrates physics, electrical design, software engineering, and operations, creating a cohesive platform that ensures the efficient operation of fusion machines, adapts to grid conditions, and evolves towards commercial reliability. This role is based on-site at our Everett, WA office and reports directly to the Senior Manager of Electrical Engineering.
Key responsibilities include:
- Assemble and lead a diverse team of software, firmware, and electrical engineers to develop the complete control stack for a fusion power plant, from embedded controllers to supervisory automation and data pipelines.
- Oversee the plant-level control system, managing closed-loop control of essential subsystems (thermal management, grid interface, uptime management) and coordinating the supervisory layer that manages overall plant operations.
- Direct system design and implementation of both hardware and software for dependable, real-time control, ensuring consistent plant performance during both scheduled operations and dynamic grid events.
- Facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration among hardware owners, data analysts, and operations teams to translate machine capabilities and experimental objectives into robust, testable control logic.
- Create front-end control and visualization interfaces that promote both rapid experimental iterations and long-term automated operations.
- Design scalable back-end data systems that can effectively acquire and correlate signals across various operations.
