Senior Manager, Software Engineering

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.

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WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

A power plant only functions smoothly if something can control it, observe it, and make sense of how it’s behaving. That means firmware on the controllers that fire the pulses, supervisory automation that coordinates the machine as a system, the network and infrastructure backbone, and data pipelines that capture events spanning nanoseconds to years. It also means the tools the rest of the company uses to operate the plant and run the business: operator tools, procedure infrastructure, maintenance and parts systems, and the data platform that turns machine data into something scientists, operators, and hardware owners can act on.

The machine and facility are first of their kind, which means the software is too. Helion's engineering culture was built around hardware, and software has grown up inside it. This role exists to give software engineering a leader of its own: someone who will establish how the discipline works, how it delivers against hardware, and how the rest of the company engages with it.

You will own two teams and the full software stack from the edge device to the data lake.

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THE TEAMS

• Plant Software builds the software that runs the machine. Firmware and embedded control on the devices that command and measure each pulse, supervisory automation that sequences the plant as a system, the real-time network and timing infrastructure that ties thousands of edge devices together, the infrastructure and cybersecurity those systems depend on, and the pipelines that capture pulse data at the source.
• Enterprise Software builds the data platform and internal applications the company runs on. The pipelines and storage that make per-pulse data usable for science and operations from single pulses to hundreds of millions, and the tools that machine operations, manufacturing, legal, inventory, and business operations teams use every day.

The work

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Own the plant software stack across embedded, supervisory, networking, infrastructure, and data layers, and the enterprise data platform and application roadmap. Software ships against hardware on a shared schedule; the data platform ships against a machine that will run many pulses a day. You own the plan, the risks, and the result.
• Our processes, review gates, and planning norms were designed for hardware. You will set how software plans, reviews, tests, deploys, responds to faults, and hands off to operations, fitted to a first-of-a-kind plant rather than imported from a previous employer: light enough to move at our pace, rigorous enough that the machine is safe to run.
• Electrical, mechanical, systems, fuel cycle, operations, and science teams all depend on software and have their own expectations of it. You will set and hold clear expectations for how those groups engage the software teams, how priorities are negotiated, and how a shared-service team says no, without formal authorit