---
title: 'Principal Software Engineer at Valar Atomics'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-valar-atomics-torrance-california-qscqppceqagz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Principal Software Engineer at Valar Atomics

- **Company:** Valar Atomics
- **Location:** Torrance California, United States
- **Compensation:** $195k–$270k
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/valaratomics/jobs/4383170009

## Job description

## 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, Software Engineering builds the internal platforms and tools that power reactor design, fuel manufacturing, licensing, and plant operations. The team partners directly with engineering, manufacturing, and operations to deliver full-stack software, integrate enterprise systems, and preserve traceability from requirement to as-built.

## The Role

The Principal Software Engineer will own the technical architecture of the operating system for Valar—the telemetry systems that capture every second of reactor and fuel test data, the streaming backbone that moves it, the simulation platforms our reactor engineers design with, and the enterprise systems that run the company. You will set the direction the rest of our software engineers build against, take the hardest problems yourself, and work directly with reactor and fuel engineers, systems engineering, licensing, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations to understand how they actually work and then build the tooling that makes them faster. This position will be located in Torrance, California, with regular travel to our Orangeville, Utah pilot plant.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own the end-to-end architecture of Valar's software platform across telemetry, streaming, simulation, and enterprise systems, and make the build-versus-buy calls that shape it for the next decade.
- Design and build high-volume telemetry ingestion for reactor test stands, fuel manufacturing, and instrumentation—high-rate time-series at scale, with source timestamps, units, quality, and ordering preserved end to end.
- Architect the streaming backbone that carries operational data to analytics, simulation, monitoring, and enterprise consumers, and engineer it for throughput, backpressure, replay, and recovery.
- Support the simulation and modeling platform: Campaign management, compute scheduling, and reproducible, traceable results engineers can defend to regulators.
- Architect and build full-stack services and web interfaces that engineers, operators, and technicians use daily, and integrate the commercial systems the company runs on (PLM, ERP, MES, document and records management) over REST, GraphQL, and event-driven interfaces.
- Design data models, interfaces, and access boundaries that keep engineering, manufacturing, test, and quality records consistent, auditable, and usable across every team that needs them.
- Establish the engineering practices this platform depends on—deployment, observability, testing, on-call, and software quality standards appropriate to a regulated environment.
- Use AI coding agents and assistants as a core part of how you work, and set the standard for how the team verifies what they produce.
- Set technical direction, lead design and code reviews, and mentor engineers as the software organization grows around you.

## Basic Qualifications

- 10+ years of relevant experience writing software and deploying it to a production environment, including significant time as the technical owner of a platform or major system.
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating high-volume telemetry or time-series systems—instrumentation, test, industrial, vehicle, or comparable high-rate data.
- Demonstrated experience with high-volume streaming and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Flink, or similar), including throughput, backpressure, ordering, and replay concerns.
- Experience building or operating simulation, modeling, or scientific computing platforms—orchestration of computational codes, batch and distributed compute, and reproducible results management.
- Experience building enterprise and engineering software: full-stack services, web interfaces, and integration with commercial systems of record.
- Demonstrated skill in both typed (like Java, C#, Go, C++, or Rust) and untyped (like Python or JavaScript) languages.
- Proven track record driving architecture and technical decisions across multiple teams and stakeholders.
- Working experience with cloud and containerized deployment, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.
- Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and data modeling.
- Hands-on experience shipping production work with AI coding agents and assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar), and the judgment to verify what they produce before it lands.
- Strong communication skills: open to the opinions of others, willing to bring your own creative ideas for solutions, and ready to own and rectify mistakes.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a scientific discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

## Preferred Skills and Experience

- Experience at a hardware, manufacturing, aerospace, energy, or heavy-industrial company where software served a physical system and downtime had physical consequences.
- Familiarity with industrial data sources and protocols—historians, OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus—and the security boundaries between operational and enterprise networks.
- Experience with HPC scheduling, GPU compute, or large-scale batch orchestration.
- Familiarity with regulated or quality-controlled environments and the software implications of NQA-1, GAMP 5, or 21 CFR Part 11.
- Experience integrating PLM, ERP, MES, LIMS, or document control systems, and a healthy skepticism about vendor claims.
- Experience with Git, Docker, Kubernetes, and deployment to both cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
- Experience building with LLMs and agents rather than just coding with them—retrieval over technical documents, agentic workflows, evaluation harnesses, or tool integrations.
- Experience growing a software team or function from its early stages, including hiring and mentorship.
- A point of view on where AI-assisted development helps, where it doesn't, and how to verify agent output in an environment where records end up in front of regulators. Tell us about it.

## What We Offer

- Competitive base salary
- Equity ownership in a rapidly growing advanced energy company
- Comprehensive medical benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Free daily lunch and dinner provided onsite
- Generous PPE stipend
- High-impact startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy
- Opportunities for rapid career growth and internal advancement
- Direct collaboration with experienced operators, engineers, and industry leaders
- The opportunity to help build and scale transformative energy technology from the ground up

## Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Valar Atomics is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status under applicable law.

We are committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination and harassment and will provide reasonable accommodation as required by law.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States as a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (green card holder). Salary $195,000—$270,000 USD

## About Valar Atomics

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Valar Atomics is scaling nuclear energy through grid-independent, high-temperature gas reactors (HTGR) for hydrogen production, data center power, heavy industrial power, and clean hydrocarbon fuel synthesis.
- **Entity Type**: Private (total funding $494M–$600.5M, latest round Debt - II)
- **Headquarters**: El Segundo, California, United States (additional location in Orangeville, Utah)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed (key executives include President Muhammad Shahzad and CNO Mark Mitchell)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Nuclear energy / advanced nuclear reactor technology
- **Target customers**: Large-scale industrial users (hydrogen producers, data centers, heavy industry), grid-independent operations, and fuel synthesis plants (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose**: “Nuclear needs scale” – unlock economies of scale by building hundreds of reactors on Valar gigasites, divorcing industrial power from the traditional grid.

## Products & Services
- **[Ward 250 Reactor]**: A grid-independent HTGR using TRISO fuel, designed for high-volume, non-bespoke production. Achieved criticality in June 2026 under DOE’s pilot program. Product type: Hardware (nuclear reactor).
- **[Hydrogen Production]**: Reactors paired with a sulfur-iodine cycle process to produce cheap, abundant hydrogen. Product type: Industrial energy product.
- **[Data Center Power]**: Dedicated on-site nuclear power for AI data centers, targeting AI’s projected 200+ TWh additional demand by 2030. Product type: Service / infrastructure.
- **[Heavy Industrial Power]**: Grid-independent power for processes like green steel and bauxite electrolysis. Product type: Service / infrastructure.
- **[Clean Hydrocarbon Fuels]**: Combines cheap hydrogen with captured CO₂ via a modified Fischer-Tropsch process to create synthetic fuels. Product type: Fuel product.
- **[Modular Citadel Shielding]**: Pre-cast, self-tensioning shielding system for mass-manufactured reactor protection. Production line capable of 1,000+ blocks per year. Product type: Hardware component.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (CB Insights shows valuation as hidden)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding reported as $494M (LinkedIn) or $600.5M (CB Insights, conflicting reports); latest round debt financing in November 2025.
- **Notable Investors**: Palmer Luckey, Shyam Sankar, Day One Ventures, DTX Ventures, Contrary, Riot Ventures (led Seed), Snowpoint Ventures (led Series A), and 28+ others.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 74 employees (+232% YoY, +9.6% monthly); 30 active job postings; Ward 250 reactor achieved criticality in June 2026; partnerships with DOE, San Rafael Energy Research Center, and State of Utah; opened first nuclear site (San Rafael) in February 2026.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proven HTGR design** with unmatched safety profile and proliferation resistance when paired with TRISO fuel.
- **Grid-independent “gigasite” model** that avoids traditional grid constraints, enabling mass manufacturing of standardized reactors.
- **Vertical integration**: In-house design of reactors, fuel processing (sulfur-iodine cycle), and shielding systems (Modular Citadel).
- **Speed to market**: Ward 250 is on track for power operations before July 4, 2026, under a DOE mandate.
- **Talent base**: Attracts engineers from Ultra Safe Nuclear, X-energy, Anduril, and other advanced hardware companies.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale manufacturing**: Transition from project-based nuclear to high-volume production through gigasites.
- **Achieve operational milestones**: Achieve hot criticality and power operation at Ward 250 by mid-2026.
- **Expand product lines**: Deliver grid-independent hydrogen, data center power, and synthetic fuels to meet industrial and AI energy demands.
- **Grow headcount rapidly**: Aggressively hiring in engineering, operations, quality, and technical roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: “Hardware is the only thing that counts” – emphasis on building real reactors, not just pitching.
- **High growth environment**: Company doubled headcount in the past year; roles offer significant ownership and impact.
- **Locations**: Hawthorne (CA), El Segundo (CA), Orangeville (UT), and Huntington (UT) – roles span design, manufacturing, and field operations.
- **Work style**: Likely on-site/hybrid for technical roles (e.g., Build Engineer, Nuclear Operations Manager, Machinist).
- **Perks & culture**: Rapid advancement opportunities, exposure to cutting-edge nuclear and chemical engineering, and a team with deep ties to defense and deep-tech.
- **Current openings**: 30+ roles including mechanical engineers, plant operators, quality engineers, finance systems engineers, and technical recruiters.

## Sources
1. [valaratomics.com](https://valaratomics.com/)
2. [Greenhouse careers](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/valaratomics)
3. [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/valar-atomics)
4. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/valar-atomics)

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