The Nuclear Company

The Nuclear Company

Research Scientist

Washington, DC

Sponsorship not specified$150k-$173kDetected 9 days ago
PythonAlgorithmsMachine LearningDeep LearningPyTorchNLPCybersecuritySOC OperationsDesign SystemsProject ManagementStakeholder ManagementAccountingSupply ChainCustomer SupportMechanical DesignControlsUnityResearchExperimental DesignLeadershipCommunicationCollaborationMentoring

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.
  • 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.
  • 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

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • Schedule Optimization: Develop models that optimize construction scheduling across multiple concurrent sites - minimizing schedule variance, resource idle time, and cascading delays across a growing fleet of projects.
  • Portfolio Decision Systems: Build models that inform how we sequence site development and allocate capital across a growing fleet - accounting for regulatory milestones, capital constraints, and correlated risks across sites.
  • Uncertainty Quantification: Develop approaches that account for uncertainty in key inputs - permitting timelines, cost distributions, grid demand forecasts - to produce portfolio decisions with bounded downside.
  • Security Intelligence: Build models for alert prioritization, anomaly detection, and patrol scheduling that support physical and cyber security operations across a distributed multi-site infrastructure.
  • 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.
  • Human-in-the-Loop Design: Design systems where models and human analysts share decision authority appropriately - communicating uncertainty clearly and degrading safely when operating outside familiar conditions.
  • Model Deployment: Collaborate with engineering to define how models are served, monitored, updated, and overridden in production - ensuring deployed systems are reliable, maintainable, and trusted by the teams that use them.

Requirements

  • Experience formally mentoring PhD-level researchers or interns
  • Some of the exciting topics you are likely to work on include:

Nice to have

  • A demonstrated ability to operate in a fast-moving environment where problem definitions evolve, priorities shift, and hands-on technical contribution - not just research direction - is expected at all levels.
  • Preferred Experience

Compensation

  • Competitive compensation packages

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, vision plans
  • Generous vacation policy, plus holidays
  • Software Engineering: Production-quality Python; deep learning frameworks (PyTorch); version control, testing, and reproducibility practices expected of research code that ships into production systems.

This listing is sourced directly from The Nuclear Company's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.