Neutronics Engineer

The ocean is the largest undeveloped frontier on earth — and the next chapter of abundant energy will be written at sea. We're building the infrastructure to power it.

About Ocean Atomics (OA)

Ocean Atomics is an American company designing, licensing, and assembling a standardized nuclear electric power plant and the surrounding support systems for maritime applications. We will install these plants on any vessel built to our nuclear-ready standards, and will provide end-to-end sustainment in our planned nuclear lifecycle dockyard. We will help develop the licensed operators to unlock this new capability for your energy intensive application at sea. To move fast and to lead the creation of this new market, we are leveraging the compact, proven systems enabled by water-cooled reactors.

Our mission

Scale nuclear energy. Power generations.

Our vision

A maritime commons thriving with abundant, economical, modern, and safe nuclear-powered activity — built, serviced, and staffed by re-industrialized American shipyards and people.

As a Neutronics Engineer, you design, simulate, and optimize the neutronic behavior of our reactor core — criticality, shutdown margin and control rod worth, kinetics parameters, depletion, and frequency-domain stability — for a core that has to hold its margins in a maritime environment. Ship motions and transient duty cycles reshape the stability and transient picture in ways a fixed-foundation core never faces. Your simulations are part of what turns scaling nuclear energy at sea into a licensable reality rather than a whiteboard concept.

This work suits someone who treats simulation as the foundation of a licensing case rather than a box to check, and who is curious about what changes when a core's operating environment never stops moving.

What You'll Do

• Build and expand core neutronics models — criticality, shutdown margin and control rod worth, kinetics parameters, transmutation/decay, and frequency-domain stability — across the design space.

• Develop coupled multiphysics models with the core design team to capture normal and transient behavior, including the dynamic conditions specific to a reactor operating at sea.

• Analyze and optimize core performance in support of trade studies, licensing documentation, and design iteration.

• Justify calculation methodologies and their verification & validation (V&V) in support of the licensing process.

• Provide core design inputs to transient analysis studies and to the simulator and operational physics teams.

• Perform shielding and activation analysis supporting the core and surrounding systems.

• Document design results, methods, and V&V basis to a standard that holds up in regulator-facing licensing packages (NRC, or equivalent).

• Coordinate with our thermal-hydraulics, fuels, and structural teams to keep neutronic design consistent with flow, thermal, and mechanical requirements.

What You Bring

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering, Engineering Physics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• Track record building and running sophisticated core neutronics simulations across criticality, kinetics, and depletion. Depth of relevant design cycles is valued above years on a résumé.

• Strong command of neutronic design couplings, tradeoffs, and coupled multiphysics behavior.

• Working proficiency with two or more common deterministic and/or stochastic neutronics tools (e.g., MCNP, OpenMC, CASMO/SIMULATE, VERA, DRAGON).

• Strong technical writing skills, with the ability to produce analysis documentation that stands up in design reviews and regulator-facing packages.

Preferred

• Advanced degree in nuclear engineering or a closely related field.

• Experience with first-of-a-kind reactor designs, small modular reactors (SMRs), or marine/vessel-borne reactor programs.

• Broad working knowledge across many neutronics tools spanning deterministic and stochastic methods.

Don't meet every bullet? We'd still like to hear from you. If you're excited by the mission and most of this resonates, apply.

Why this matters

Every industry on Earth needs scalable, clean energy, and the ocean is the ideal place to unlock it. Joining Ocean Atomics means building real, lasting infrastructure — the kind that powers generations. The world needs abundant energy. Let's make it happen.

Ocean Atomics LLC is an equal opportunity employer.

We are committed to a workplace free of discrimination and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations; if you need an accommodation during the application process, contact [email protected].