Space Mechanical Design Engineering Intern - Summer 2027

Location: Los Angeles Department: Internships Employment Type: Intern Location Type: On-site

About Us

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.

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.

About the Summer Internship Program

Internships at Antares are anything but ordinary. You'll work alongside our team as we design, build, and test fission microreactors built to deliver reliable energy for critical missions on Earth, in space, and underwater.

Our interns contribute to real work from day one. Depending on your role, you may touch hardware, write and test software, support manufacturing and operations, or help build the systems that allow Antares to move quickly as we scale. You'll work alongside engineers, operators, and other experts solving challenging problems—and you'll leave your internship with hands-on experience that's difficult to find anywhere else.

We work hard, move quickly, and take pride in what we're building. If you're excited to learn by doing and want to contribute to the next generation of nuclear energy, we'd love to have you join us next summer.

We will be running two separate cohorts to accommodate students on both semester and quarter schedules:

Cohort #1

Monday, May 17 – Friday, August 13

Cohort #2

Monday, June 14 – Friday, September 10

All internship roles are based at our Torrance headquarters and require interns to work onsite five days per week. We will not be considering candidates for remote or hybrid arrangements.

Interns will receive a relocation and housing stipend as part of their offer package.

About the Role

As a Space Mechanical Design Intern, you will contribute to the mechanical design and development of Antares reactor and power systems, with a particular focus on space applications. You will work on hardware ranging from space radiators and power conversion components to reactor mechanical systems, taking projects from early design and manufacturing concepts through integration and testing.

You will also evaluate how Antares systems could be deployed across different applications, translating customer operating conditions into technical requirements and concepts of operation. This role offers exposure to both detailed hardware development and the system-level engineering required to deploy nuclear power systems in space and terrestrial applications.

Roles and Responsibilities

Design, develop, and test space radiator hardware

Develop manufacturing approaches for scaling radiator technology from small test coupons to full-scale hardware

Contribute to the development and integration of space power conversion systems

Own the design and development of power conversion components such as recuperators, primary heat exchangers, and piping

Support overall mechanical integration of space power conversion systems

Contribute to reactor mechanical design

Perform microgrid analyses, including identifying nominal customer load profiles, outage frequencies, integration with other energy sources, and power distribution requirements

Develop reactor deployment assessments and concepts of operation for candidate applications

Evaluate external markets, including process heat, to identify potential reactor deployment concepts and customer use cases

Translate potential customer applications into technical requirements

Expand technoeconomic analyses to evaluate potential reactor applications and deployment scenarios

Basic Qualifications

Enrolled in at least a bachelor’s degree program, and going into your Junior or Senior year of studies

Must have prior internship experience, or significant (>1yr) project team, laboratory, or research experience

Preferred Skills & Experience

GPA of 3.5 or above

Experience in a University club or organization, leadership role preferred

Strong interpersonal and technical communication skills (examples: leading a student project team, presenting research at conferences, etc.)

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail

Ability to work cross-departmentally with different groups and teams

Ability to work effectively in a dynamic environment with changing needs and requirements

Ability to work independently and in a team, take initiative, and communicate effectively

Location

We are located in Torrance, CA in a 322,000 square foot, brand new facility featuring large open spaces for team collaboration, R&D, and production, as well as easy access to the 405, 105, and 110 freeways. Our facility is in the heart of Los Angeles' vibrant emerging tech ecosystem alongside many other high growth startups and enterprises.

Culture

At Antares, we like to specifically tie each role to our founding document’s set of values–here are the top five cultural values we think you should believe at your core to be successful:

Think in Systems - Energy and Defense are complex ecosystems with numerous stakeholders with competing priorities, conflicting policies, perverse incentives, and emergent and path-dependent properties. First principles thinking alone is insufficient. Think probabilistically and then take action. “If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete.” Over-optimizing the components often deg