Lead OT Engineer

About Valar Atomics

At Valar Atomics, we're redefining what's possible in energy. Our mission is to make clean, high-temperature nuclear power scalable—unlocking abundant energy for industry, hydrogen, and next-generation manufacturing. We are a team of builders, engineers, and operators who believe nuclear energy should be fast to deploy, factory-made, and built for the real world. Our first pilot plant in Orangeville, Utah will demonstrate how advanced nuclear systems and fuel fabrication can power the future. Joining Valar Atomics means becoming part of a company where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level.

The Team

As part of the Engineering organization, Instrumentations & Controls designs the systems that monitor, automate, and protect Valar's facilities and reactor technologies. The team develops reliable control architectures that enable safe and efficient operations.

The Role

Valar Atomics is developing high-temperature gas-cooled small modular reactors through licensing, construction, commissioning, and operations. Lead OT Engineers are the accountable owner for integrated OT within one major program: reactor, fuel, or power conversion. This is in addition to being a standard writer for the common OT architecture for their applicable program.  

Valar will have one lead OT engineer for several program-aligned roles. Each lead owns the strategy, architecture, system boundaries, technical requirements, standards, acceptance criteria, roadmap, and delivery of an assigned program while working with the other leads to maintain one coherent technical baseline. You will decide what must be common, what must be program-specific, and how supporting systems remain secure, recoverable, and unable to create dependencies for or interfere with control or credited safety functions. 

This is an owner-builder and people-lead role, not a management-only position. You will hire and develop a multidisciplinary team, remain the final technical escalation point, hold vendors accountable, and lead design reviews, commissioning, startup, outages, and incident response in the field. The systems and standards you establish will become the operating model inherited by future facilities and a distributed reactor fleet. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own the OT strategy, architecture, roadmap, schedule, and delivery for an assigned reactor, fuel-manufacturing, or power-conversion program from requirements through commissioning and operations. 
• Build, hire, lead, and develop a multidisciplinary OT engineering team; define clear ownership, grow technical leaders, and scale support across multiple facilities without unnecessary bureaucracy. 
• Establish technical requirements, system boundaries, design standards, interface definitions, acceptance criteria, and common practices across infrastructure, networking, HMI, operational data, cybersecurity, and recovery. 
• Remain the hands-on technical authority during early design, architecture trades, integration, troubleshooting, failure testing, commissioning, startup, outages, and incident response. 
• Lead design reviews, procurement, vendor selection, installation validation, verification and validation, commissioning, turnover, and operational readiness. 
• Own technical interfaces with IC&E, Operations, Turbomachinery, Mechanical Engineering, Health Physics, Construction, Quality, infrastructure teams, and the broader SCADA & OT organization. 
• Define configuration management, change control, documentation, cybersecurity, backup and recovery, lifecycle, and operational-support practices; ensure supporting systems cannot interfere with control or credited safety functions. 
• Manage vendors, contractors, and systems integrators through scopes of work, technical deliverables, schedules, acceptance criteria, escalation, and final accountability. 
• Communicate technical status, staffing needs, program risks, tradeoffs, and required decisions clearly to engineers, operators, and company leadership. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Demonstrated ownership of OT or industrial control infrastructure for a complex power-generation, manufacturing, chemical-processing, test, or similarly demanding facility. 
• Experience hiring, managing, and developing engineers and building a technical team or function. 
• Strong working knowledge of industrial networking, compute and virtualization, storage, identity and PKI, HMI, historians and data systems, OT cybersecurity, and server-room infrastructure. 
• Experience leading systems through requirements, design, procurement, integration, verification, commissioning, turnover, and operations. 
• Ability to review multidisciplinary engineering work, identify material technical risks, define system boundaries, and make defensible architecture decisions. 
• Experience translating technical, regulatory, quality, and cybersecurity requirements into designs, acceptance criteria, verification plans, and controlled operating practices. 
• Experience managing vendors, contractors, and systems integrators and holding them accountable for technical quality, schedule, and delivery. 
• Strong technical writing, visualization, and executive-communication skills. Frequent travel and hands-on field work in Orangeville are required. Formal degrees and certifications are not required; equivalent technical experience is acceptable. 

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience in nuclear energy, conventional power generation, oil and gas, chemical processing, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, or another regulated or safety-conscious industry. 
• Experience delivering first-of-a-kind facilities, pilot plants, greenfield industrial sites, test facilities, or major capital projects through commissioning and operations. 
• Experience with Rockwell FactoryTalk, Proxmox, Arista, Palo Alto, AVEVA PI, InfluxDB, SQL, Grafana, OPC UA, or equivalent technologies. 
• Experience with air-gapped environments, network segmentation, unidirectional data flows, controlled remote access, and authorized OT cybersecurity testing. 
• Experience with one or more of reactor or power-generation systems, recipe-driven manufacturing and material genealogy, MES/LIMS/QMS integration, turbomachinery or generator test facilities, or balance-of-plant systems. 

What We Offer  

• Competitive base salary 
• Equity ownership in a rapidly growing advanced energy company 
• Comprehensive medical benefits 
• Unlimited PTO
• Free daily lunch  
• Generous PPE stipend
• High-impact startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy 
• Opportunities for rapid career growth and internal advancement 
• Direct collaboration with experienced operators, engineers, and industry leaders 
• The opportunity to help build and scale transformative energy technology from the ground up

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Valar Atomics is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status under applicable law.

We are committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination and harassment and will provide reasonable accommodation as required by law.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States as a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (green card holder).