Lead OT Engineer – Fuel

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, Ins t ru mentations & 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 from first principles spanning early R&D through licensing, construction, and commissioning. The Lead OT engineer for fuel will own the SCADA/OT function supporting the reactor and its shared balance-of-plant interfaces. This role sits at the intersection of deep engineering and program leadership: you will build and lead the fuel labs OT team while remaining a hands-on technical authority shaping design decisions, safety system philosophy, and regulatory strategy.   This scope includes industrial networking, compute/virtualization, storage, identity/access management, engineering workstations, HMI infrastructure, historians, operational data systems, cybersecurity boundaries, server room design, and the software/licensing required to keep these systems available, reliable, maintainable, and secure.   You will work closely with IC&E, Operations, Mechanical Engineering, Health Physics, Construction, Quality, and the broader SCADA & OT organization. The OT team owns the communications, infrastructure, software, data, identity, and cybersecurity environment required to engineer, operate, monitor, and maintain those systems. IC&E owns field instrumentation, PLC application programming, protection logic, and electrical/control hardware.    We expect most candidates to come from oil & gas, power generation, or advanced industrial sectors. Nuclear experience is valued but not required; what matters is your ability to apply rigorous engineering discipline to first-of-a-kind systems and grow into the nuclear regulatory environment with us.   Key Responsibilities   Own the  fuel lab  OT strategy, architecture, roadmap, schedule, and delivery from design through commissioning/operations.   Build, hire, lead, and grow a multidisciplinary OT engineering team capable of supporting multiple reactor programs.   Establish technical requirements, system boundaries, design standards, interface definitions, and acceptance criteria across infrastructure/networking/SCADA/data/cybersecurity.   Maintain technical authority over reactor SCADA/OT while remaining hands-on during early design, integration, troubleshooting, and commissioning.   Lead design reviews, procurement, vendor selection, integration, verification/validation, commissioning, turnover, and operational readiness.   Own technical interfaces with IC&E/Operations/Mechanical Engineering/Health Physics/Construction/Quality.   Define configuration management, change control, documentation, cybersecurity, recovery, and lifecycle practices for reactor SCADA/OT systems.   Manage vendors/contractors/systems integrators, including scopes of work, technical deliverables, schedules, acceptance criteria, and escalation.   Communicate technical status, staffing needs, program risks, and required decisions clearly to engineering/company leadership.   You Will Be Successful in This Role If   You take complete ownership of broad technical scope and can deliver before a large team or mature organization exists.   You can move between organizational leadership, system architecture, design review, field execution, and hands-on troubleshooting.   You know how to hire strong engineers, define clear ownership, develop technical leaders, and scale a team without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.   You can distinguish between work that must be performed internally and work that can be delegated to vendors/contractors.   You make practical engineering decisions under ambiguity without compromising safety, reliability, or configuration control.   You create clear requirements, diagrams, procedures, and technical direction that engineers/vendors can execute against.   You are comfortable working in a fast-moving, first-of-a-kind environment with changing priorities and aggressive schedules.   You are willing to maintain a strong field presence during construction, commissioning, startup, outages, and incident response.   Basic Qualifications   Demonstrated ownership of OT or industrial control infrastructure for a complex industrial, power-generation, manufacturing, chemical-processing, or similarly demanding facility.   Experience hiring/managing/developing engineers and building a technical team or function.   Strong working knowledge of industrial networking, compute/virtualization, storage, identity/PKI, historians/data systems, OT cybersecurity, and server room infrastructure.   Experience leading systems through requirements/design/procurement/integration/commissioning/operations.   Ability to review multidisciplinary engineering work, identify material technical risks, and make defensible architecture decisions.   Experience translating technical/regulatory/quality/cybersecurity requirements into designs, acceptance criteria, and verification plans.   Experience managing vendors/contractors/systems integrators and holding them accountable for technical quality/schedule/delivery.   St