R&D Lead – Control Systems

Skills this role screens for

About the role

About Helion

We are a fusion power company based in Everett, WA, with the mission to build the world's first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity. Our vision is a world with clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone.

Since Helion's founding in 2013, we have raised $1.5 billion from long-time investors such as Sam Altman, Mithril, and Capricorn Investment Group as well as new investors including Thrive Capital, LightSpeed Venture Capital, SoftBank, and others to propel us forward. Our current prototype, Polaris, has reached record-breaking plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (13 keV). Helion is continuing to iterate and on the path to the world's first fusion power plant, Orion.

This is a pivotal time to join Helion. You will tackle real-world challenges with a team that prizes urgency, rigor, ownership, and a commitment to delivering hard truths – values essential to achieving what no one has before. Together, we will change the future of energy, because the world can't wait.

The work

What You Will Be Doing

You will lead the Control Systems team within Helion’s R&D department in delivering reliable control and data acquisition systems that enable rapid experimentation while creating a scalable foundation for increasingly complex machines. This team delivers and maintains systems for high-voltage electrical test bays, plasma-technology test bays, production and manufacturing end-of-line testing, and large field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma machines.

Your near-term focus will be strengthening and standardizing control system architectures, hardware, software, and development practices across these applications. This includes advancing blended systems that use LabVIEW and NI hardware for FPGA and real-time layers, with API wrappers enabling Python or other text-based user interfaces and workflows. Over time, the team’s scope may expand to include contributions to the control system for Orion, Helion’s first fusion power plant. This is an onsite role that reports directly to the R&D Manager at our Everett, WA office.

The work

You Will

• Lead the Controls Engineering team in the timely delivery of reliable control and data acquisition systems supporting R&D operations
• Set technical direction and improve development practices across architecture, coding, testing, deployment, configuration management, and documentation
• Advance scalable, maintainable blended architectures and use AI-assisted tools to accelerate code development, unit testing, and workflow automation
• Partner closely with scientists, engineers, machine operators, production teams, and other stakeholders to translate operational needs into effective controls solutions
• Lead, coach, and mentor engineers, including any direct reports, through clear expectations, actionable feedback, and technical rigor
• Anticipate technical and staffing constraints and demonstrate potential to take on broader strategic and organizational leadership

Who they want

Required Skills

• Demonstrated technical leadership experience and potential, including coaching or mentoring engineers; prior formal management experience is not required
• Strong proficiency with LabVIEW and NI hardware in control system applications, including PXI, cRIO, real-time systems, and FPGA, with the ability to increase the team’s technical capability
• Ability to set technical direction, improve code development processes, prioritize competing needs, and lead a team through ambiguous or rapidly changing requirements
• Experience developing control and data acquisition systems for large-scale, complex hardware
• Strong cross-functional communication and collaboration skills
• Experience designing or integrating blended control systems that connect LabVIEW and NI layers with Python, C/C++, MATLAB, or other text-based code through well-defined APIs
• Experience using AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate code development, unit testing, or workf