Member of Technical Staff - Plasma Physics
at Maritime Fusion — Fusion reactors for ships
What the role involves
We’re looking for a Plasma Physicist who’s not just into theory—but wants to design, simulate, and help build marine deployable tokamaks. You’ll spend your time running transport and system codes, exploring divertor concepts and operational scenarios, and conducting system level tradeoff studies.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Running simulations across the full plasma + machine stack: plasma equilibrium and magnetic system optimization, stability & confinement, transport, edge physics, burning plasma physics, diagnostic system design, disruption mitigation.
Using tools like POPCON, TokaMaker, ASTRA, TGLF, Fuse, CGYRO, BALOO, UEDGE, Bluemira, COMSOL, ANSYS, FEA, and OpenMC to analyze and optimize the full system.
Developing models and workflows to connect simulations with real-world design constraints.
Form relationships and foster collaboration with academic & government labs to further optimize and explore the tokamak design space.
Solving hard problems.
What You Bring
- Ph.D/M.S. in Plasma Physics, Nuclear Engineering, Applied Physics, or similar (or equivalent experience).
- Experience modeling tokamaks or similar fusion devices— from grad school, postdoc, or industry.
- Strong coding and engineering fundamentals.
- Willingness to do the dirty work involved with early stage startups; assemble the office furniture, setup software licenses, form strong external industry relationships.
About Maritime Fusion
Maritime Fusion is building fusion reactors for ships and off grid energy markets. En route on this endeavor we’re commercializing High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) cable technology for power distribution while advancing the physics basis of our HTS tokamak to decarbonize global shipping. Breakeven fusion is coming soon, but the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors will be costly, high maintenance, and have low capacity factors, leading to 5–10x higher electricity cost on the grid. Maritime Fusion is pursuing the most widely accepted approach to fusion, the tokamak, but specifically designed for the marine environment where the challenges that arise between breakeven and a commercially viable energy source are alleviated. The market we're targeting requires 15x less power, lower up-time, and costs the same as alternative fuels but without any emissions. Since fusion does not use highly radioactive fuels or materials – unlike fission – we sidestep the vast majority of regulatory challenges and safety risks associated with nuclear energy. Our team brings over a decade of industry and research experience in plasma physics, nuclear engineering, and electrical engineering with backgrounds at SpaceX, Tesla, Columbia University, and University of Pennsylvania.
Full Maritime Fusion profile