Maritime Fusion Member of Technical Staff - R&D Engineering San Francisco, CA · Full time Company website

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Maritime Fusion is building fusion reactors for ships and off grid energy markets. En route on this endeavor we’re commercializing High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) cable technology for power distribution while advancing the physics basis of our HTS tokamak to decarbonize global shipping. Since participating in the world's leading startup accelerator, Y Combinator, we’ve moved quickly to plot the most pragmatic path to getting the First of a Kind (FOAK) fusion reactors out in the world in an application most primed to benefit from recent advances in HTS magnet technology. Our founding team brings a unique blend of hands-on engineering experience from Tesla and SpaceX, combined with deep academic expertise in plasma physics and fusion energy technology from academia and industry.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Building and testing HTS (high-temperature superconducting) hardware: including REBCO conductors/cables, high-current power supplies, energy storage systems, cryogenic cooling systems, and integrated test fixtures.
• Standing up our R&D lab: benches, instrumentation, vacuum hardware, DAQs, software licenses, and everything in between.
• Owning your designs end-to-end: generating CAD and drawings, running FEA, sourcing components, working with vendors, and leading mechanical/electrical assembly.
• Hands-on prototyping: CNC machining and fabrication, soldering, wiring, assembling cryostats, working with LN₂, using DMMs/oscilloscopes, characterizing sensors and circuits.
• Developing and debugging electronics: from sensing circuits and high-current drivers to embedded control and data acquisition.
• Defining requirements and translating tokamak-level system attributes: into subsystem performance metrics.
• Solving genuinely hard problems: across physics, engineering, and manufacturing under real-world constraints.
• Collaborating closely with a small, multidisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, and technicians: sharing results quickly, making design tradeoffs explicit, and helping shape our technical roadmap.

What You Bring

• A well-rounded electromechanical engineering skillset spanning CAD/FEA (SolidWorks, CATIA, Ansys, COMSOL), PCB design (Altium, KiCad), power electronics, embedded systems, and mechanical design/fabrication.
• Hands-on hardware experience across mechanical builds, electronics bring-up, test setups, and system integration.
• Comfort with lab tools and instrumentation: CNC machines, machine shop tools, soldering equipment, oscilloscopes, DMMs, high-current supplies, vacuum pumps, and cryogenic hardware.
• Familiarity with power electronics and measurement/sensing circuits.
• Software proficiency: data acquisition, PLCs, Python scripting, test automation, and control systems.
• Bonus experience: working with REBCO tape, high vacuum, high voltage, high current, cryogenic systems, or industrial test infrastructure.
• Willingness to do the dirty work involved with early stage startups: assembling the office furniture, setting up software licenses, and forming strong external industry relationships.

Compensation

120k-200k base + 0.1-1% equity