Research Scientist

The Nuclear Company is the fastest growing AI tech-enabled startup in the nuclear and energy space, pioneering a fleet-scale approach to building the next generation of nuclear reactors. Through our design-once, build-many model, we're accelerating the deployment of safe, reliable, and affordable nuclear energy. We operate with an AI-first mindset.

Every employee is expected to leverage AI, technology, and the Nuclear Operating System (NOS) as integral components of their role to improve the quality, speed, and impact of their work. We expect every team member to continuously identify opportunities to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, improve processes, and contribute to the ongoing evolution of NOS as a strategic operating capability that enables The Nuclear Company to scale with excellence. We hire people who are driven by purpose, thrive in ambiguity, and are energized by building what has never been built before.

Our team combines intellectual curiosity with high agency, embraces candid feedback and continuous learning, and holds themselves and others to exceptional standards. Our values— Transparency, Responsibility, Unity, Scrappiness, and Tenacity —guide how we hire, collaborate, and make decisions every day. They are not words on a wall; they are the standard by which we operate.

TRUST is the foundation of our safety culture, fostering intellectual honesty, accountability, and open communication, while our values challenge every team member to execute with urgency, humility, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to our mission.

About The Role

Deploying a fleet of nuclear power plants is one of the most ambitious and consequential undertakings in the global energy transition — and The Nuclear Company is doing it. You will join a small but world-class Applied Research and AI team and work on genuinely hard, open research problems at the intersection of AI and large-scale infrastructure: how do you optimize construction across a fleet of simultaneous sites, allocate capital intelligently under deep uncertainty, and keep a distributed critical infrastructure secure? These are not incremental problems — they sit at the frontier of applied AI research, with real operational stakes and the potential to reshape how the energy industry is built.

In this role, you will research novel approaches to these problems, collaborate closely with domain experts and engineering partners, and see your work through to deployed systems that actively inform decisions — across construction, capital planning, security operations, and beyond. You will work alongside some of the top nuclear industry experts in the field, a team of PhD-level researchers, and software engineers dedicated to bringing your models into production — giving you the domain depth, technical support, and collaborative environment to do your best work. This is a place to make major contributions on a small but growing team, develop your skills across a remarkable range of hard problems, and be part of something that genuinely matters.

Responsibilities

Research & Modeling Problem Formulation: Translate complex operational processes into well-defined research problems; identify the right modeling approach for each domain and build the case for why it will work in practice. Simulation & Evaluation: Build simulation environments that faithfully represent our operational processes — construction scheduling, portfolio sequencing, security operations — and can be used to train, evaluate, and iterate on decision-making models. Empirical Research: Design rigorous experiments, maintain reproducible codebases, and communicate results clearly in internal reports and, where the research warrants it, external publications.