Equipment Reliability Engineer

📋 Job Overview

At Antares, our long-term mission is to make clean energy abundant from Earth to the Asteroid Belt. We’re fueled by the belief that advanced nuclear energy can strengthen our military, solve the climate crisis, elevate global living standards, and expand humanity's presence in outer space. To achieve our mission, we’re building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors that can be used terrestrially, underwater, and in space.

🏢 About Antares

The Antares team hails from SpaceX, the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, MIT, Rigetti Computing, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Idaho, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Savannah River. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has hundreds of million-dollars on contract with the military services, NASA, and the Department of Energy.

🎯 The Role

As an Equipment Reliability Engineer, you will own the systems and technical work required to keep critical manufacturing equipment safe, available, and capable. You will work directly with CNC machining tools and other production assets, lead difficult breakdown repairs, establish preventive and predictive maintenance, build the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) from the ground up, and ensure new equipment is commissioned with a complete operational and maintenance handoff.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Develop and execute the site equipment reliability roadmap for CNC machine tools and other critical manufacturing assets, balancing safety, quality, uptime, cost, and production risk.
• Lead troubleshooting and breakdown repair for complex mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision-motion issues; coordinate OEM or specialist support when required.
• Create and optimize preventive and predictive maintenance plans using equipment criticality, OEM guidance, failure history, and condition data.
• Build and administer the CMMS from scratch, including asset hierarchy, equipment records, PM libraries, work-order workflows, labor and downtime tracking, spare parts data, dashboards etc.
• Establish and manage a critical spare parts inventory strategy based on equipment criticality, failure risk, part cost, supplier lead time, availability, and production impact; optimize stocking levels to balance equipment uptime with inventory carrying cost.
• Facilitate root cause analysis and corrective action for chronic or high-impact failures using structured methods such as 5 Whys, fault-tree analysis, and FMEA; verify that corrective actions are sustained.
• Own equipment commissioning and maintenance readiness for new or relocated machines, including acceptance criteria, installation coordination, utility and safety checks, and handoff to operations.
• Establish and report reliability metrics such as uptime, OEE inputs, PM compliance, planned-versus-reactive work, repeat failures, backlog health, and maintenance cost.
• Manage improvement projects from scope through closeout, coordinating schedules, budgets, vendors, parts, risk, change control, and stakeholder communication while supporting urgent production needs.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, electrical, manufacturing, industrial, mechatronics engineering or a related technical field AND 3+ years of hands-on equipment reliability, industrial maintenance, manufacturing equipment, or commissioning experience;
• OR 8+ years of progressively responsible industrial maintenance or equipment reliability experience, including substantial work with CNC machine tools and automated production equipment.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and repair CNC machine tools or comparable complex production equipment across mechanical, electrical, controls, hydraulic, pneumatic, and precision systems.
• Experience designing and implementing a CMMS program from a blank system through asset loading, PM deployment, work management, reporting, and adoption.
• Strong knowledge of preventive and predictive maintenance, equipment criticality, spare-parts strategy, root-cause analysis, FMEA, and reliability performance metrics.
• Experience commissioning CNC equipment, automated manufacturing systems, or other capital assets, including factory or site acceptance, installation, validation, training, and maintenance handoff.
• Project management experience leading equipment upgrades, relocations, overhauls, maintenance shutdowns, or reliability improvements with cross-functional teams and external vendors.
• Clear technical documentation and communication skills, with the ability to train technicians, influence engineering and operations partners, and remain effective during high-pressure breakdowns.

🎁 Benefits

Compensation: $115K – $150K • Offers Equity

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Ability to support off-shift, weekend, or on-call work as necessary for breakdowns, commissioning, shutdowns