Controls Engineering Intern / Student Researcher - Winter 2026

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. A hands-on controls role for a student who wants to take theory all the way to real hardware. The Antares Mission Engineering Team is seeking a motivated master’s student or advanced undergraduate student, preferably junior year or above, to participate in controls engineering for nuclear technology and support hands-on controls development for prototype terrestrial and space electromechanical systems. The ideal candidate has a strong foundation in classical controls and is excited to bridge theory with real hardware, especially in robotics, actuation, or experimental automation systems. This role will involve designing, implementing, and testing control loops using commercial off-the-shelf hardware such as NI DAQ systems, programmable power supplies, motor drives, sensors, and electrical actuation hardware. The work will span system identification, time-domain modeling, Laplace-domain control design, data acquisition, and closed-loop validation on physical hardware. This role is 5 days a week in our Torrance, CA headquarters - remote candidates will not be considered. Responsibilities Develop and tune classical controllers for actuation and thermal/electromechanical systems Build time-domain models of physical systems from first principles and experimental data Design controllers using Laplace-domain tools, including transfer functions, poles/zeros, bandwidth, stability margins, and step-response analysis Compare model predictions against experimental behavior, work with hardware responsible engineers to interpret test results, and iterate on controller design Iterate on digital twins using field test data and multiphysics simulation results Required Qualifications Current master’s student or junior/senior undergraduate in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, robotics, controls, aerospace, or related field Strong understanding of classical control theory Experience with time-domain modeling and Laplace-domain control design Ability to move between continuous-time and discrete-time control representations, including converting Laplace-domain models into time-steppable simulations suitable for controller implementation and numerical analysis Familiarity with PID control, transfer functions, stability, bandwidth, and transient response Hands-on experience with actuation systems such as motors, heaters, valves, servos, linear actuators, or similar hardware Comfortable working with sensors, DAQs, electrical drive hardware, and experimental test setups Strong Python programming experience, including building reusable simulation components, numerical test harnesses, and controller validation tools beyond basic array manipulation Preferred Qualifications Robotics or mechatronics project experience Experience bringing up and integrating COTS test hardware such as NI DAQs, motor drives, power supplies, relays, sensors, and instrumentation, including debugging, calibration, and test procedure development Experience writing Python scripts for data acquisition, control-loop execution, logging, and analysis Experience with NI DAQ hardware, DAQmx, or Python-bas