Senior Reactor Operator Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

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, Instrumentations & Controls designs the systems that monitor, automate, and protect Valar's facilities and reactor technologies. The team develops reliable control architectures that enable safe and efficient operations. 

The Role 

Valar Atomics is developing high temperature gas cooled small modular reactors from first principles spanning early R&D through licensing, construction, and commissioning. The Senior OT Data Engineer will own the operational data architecture connecting industrial sources, historians, time-series databases, semantic models, visualization, and controlled downstream consumers across Valar's reactor, fuel, and power-conversion programs. This is a hands-on role spanning software, databases, storage, networking, cybersecurity boundaries, and field commissioning. 

Your scope includes FactoryTalk Historian SE/AVEVA PI, InfluxDB/SQL, OPC UA/MQTT/APIs, ETL/data pipelines, semantic data models, Grafana, virtualized data services, RAID/ZFS storage, backup/recovery, high-rate time-series data, data quality/lineage, and controlled transfer through air-gapped/unidirectional boundaries to enterprise/cloud systems. 

You will work closely with the Senior SCADA Engineer, Senior OT Network Engineer, Senior OT Infrastructure Engineer, IC&E, Operations, Quality, and engineering users. The SCADA Engineer owns the FactoryTalk platform and operator-facing SCADA environment; you own cross-system data pipelines/models/storage/controlled egress. IC&E owns field instrumentation, PLC application programming, protection logic, and electrical/control hardware. Data systems must preserve source timestamps/quality and cannot interfere with control or credited safety functions. 
This role is shared across programs and requires frequent field work in Torrance and Orangeville. We expect candidates from power generation, oil & gas, process manufacturing, aerospace, industrial software, or other environments where data fidelity/availability/security matter. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own OT data architecture, standards, roadmaps, interfaces, naming/context, retention, and lifecycle across reactor, fuel, and power-conversion programs. 
• Deploy/administer FactoryTalk Historian SE/AVEVA PI, InfluxDB, SQL, virtualized data services, and supporting storage/backup/recovery infrastructure. 
• Build/operate OPC UA/MQTT/API/ETL ingestion pipelines that preserve source timestamps, values, units, quality, ordering, and traceability. 
• Develop semantic data models/metadata/tag context/material genealogy interfaces that make operational data consistently usable across teams. 
• Design/validate controlled data transfer across security zones, air gaps, and unidirectional data flows to enterprise/cloud/central monitoring systems. 
• Engineer time-series retention/compression/query performance/replication/high availability/recovery and validate failure behavior. 
• Build Grafana/query/analysis interfaces with engineers/operators while keeping data ownership/access boundaries explicit. 
• Develop/deploy C#/PowerShell/CMD services/scripts for acquisition/transformation/validation/monitoring and maintain controlled source/configuration records. 
• Monitor data quality/pipeline health/storage capacity/access/audit and perform authorized cybersecurity testing/remediation for data systems. 
• Lead integration/commissioning/troubleshooting/vendor escalation/turnover and maintain current diagrams, data contracts, manuals, and runbooks. 

You Will Be Successful in This Role If 

• You treat timestamps/quality/lineage/context as engineering data, not optional metadata. 
• You can trace a bad value from the source interface through transport/transformation/storage/query/visualization and identify where it changed. 
• You design data systems that remain decoupled from process control and cannot create a dependency on external/less-trusted systems. 
• You can balance throughput/latency/retention/recovery/security without building unnecessary complexity. 
• You test backup/restore/replay/failover/data-loss behavior and quantify limitations instead of assuming the platform is reliable. 
• You create clear data contracts/models/diagrams/runbooks that other engineers can implement and operate. 
• You take complete ownership before a mature data platform/team exists and can lead vendors without outsourcing technical judgment. 
• You are willing to travel frequently and maintain a strong field presence during construction, commissioning, startup, outages, and incidents. 

Basical Qualifications 

• Demonstrated ownership of industrial historian/time-series/data-integration systems in power generation, oil & gas, manufacturing, aerospace, or a similarly demanding environment. 
• Direct experience administering FactoryTalk Historian SE and its AVEVA PI foundation, including points/interfaces/archives/collectives/backup/recovery/performance. 
• Strong experience with InfluxDB/SQL or equivalent time-series/relational databases, including schema/retention/query/performance/backup/recovery. 
• Experience building production OPC UA/MQTT/API/ETL pipelines with explicit timestamp/quality/error/retry/idempotency behavior. 
• Experience developing semantic data models/metadata/tag context and Grafana or equivalent visualization/query interfaces. 
• Experience with Proxmox or equivalent virtualization plus RAID/ZFS or equivalent storage, capacity planning, replication, backup/restore, and data recovery. 
• Strong working knowledge of industrial networking, segmentation, air-gapped environments, unidirectional data flows, and controlled enterprise/cloud transfer. 
• Ability to develop/deploy/maintain data services and automation using C#/PowerShell/CMD or equivalent tools. 
• Strong technical writing/visualization/vendor-management/cybersecurity-testing skills and willingness to perform frequent field work in Orangeville. 
• Formal degrees/certifications are not required. Equivalent technical experience is acceptable. 

Preferred Skills and Experience 

• Experience with high-volume/high-rate operational data, historian collectives, distributed buffering, replay, and loss/duplicate detection. 
• Experience in nuclear energy, power generation, oil & gas, chemical processing, advanced manufacturing, or other safety-conscious industries. 
• Experience designing data-diode/unidirectional egress and centralized monitoring for multiple isolated facilities. 
• Experience integrating SCADA/OT data with MES/LIMS/QMS while preserving system ownership, material genealogy, quality records, and security boundaries. 
• Experience delivering first-of-a-kind data platforms for greenfield facilities through commissioning/operations. 

What We Offer  

• Competitive base salary 
• Equity ownership in a rapidly growing advanced energy company 
• Comprehensive medical benefits 
• Unlimited PTO
• Free daily lunch 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).