Microwave Design Engineer

WHO WE ARE

Proxima Fusion is Europe’s fastest-growing fusion company and the continent’s best-funded fusion player, as well as the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Backed by over €650M and powered by a growing team across Munich, Zurich, and Oxford, we are developing the hardware and infrastructure needed to deliver the world’s first commercial stellarator fusion power plant.

WHY JOIN PROXIMA FUSION

• Work on a civilisation-scale problem - Clean, baseload fusion energy is one of the few genuinely world-changing challenges, and every hire in Finance, People, or Legal directly accelerates the path to a working stellarator.
• Grow as fast as the company does - With headcount set to roughly 5x in a few years and major technical milestones ahead on the path to our demo machine and first power plant, your role grows under you; today's hire is tomorrow's function lead.
• Tackle problems that don't exist elsewhere - Fusion sits at a rare intersection of deep-tech R&D, industrial procurement, government relations, and venture financing, so non-tech functions face challenges no other workplace can offer.

YOUR IMPACT

As a microwave design engineer, you will help build the basis for the millimeter wave hardware acting as the spark plug that initiates a fusion plasma and raises its temperature to greater than 100 million degrees. You’ll join the Alpha Heating System team ready to drive the integrated RF and thermo-mechanical design of high-power components, and help build and test these components in the lab before installing them at scale on our net scientific gain Alpha stellarator.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Provide innovative solutions to complex RF engineering challenges by collaborating closely with physicists to ensure component designs meet the Alpha plasma physics and thermal-mechanical constraints.
• Develop designs and evaluate vendor designs to determine an optimal path to efficiently deliver our power to the stellarator - driving down the denominator of input power that will limit fusion power plant gain Q=Pout/Pin - and drive down costs.
• Draw from and contribute to our stellarator development process, interfacing your RF components with other stellarator systems.
• Contribute to mechanical and thermal analysis and sensitivity studies for component viability under the loads and stresses imposed by the combination of vacuum, magnetic fields, temperatures, and MW-scale RF loads.
• Interface with the Alpha project management teams to realize the delivery of RF components and meet the tight Proxima timelines.

WHO YOU ARE

• A highly capable RF engineer with experience in millimeter waves and knowledge of the tools and best practices for design of these systems
• Demonstrated familiarly with RF modeling codes - SURF3D, CST, COMSOL, GdfidL, openEMS, even self-developed python codes or ones plasma physics community hasn’t heard of - capable of performing modeling at 200 GHz frequencies
• Experience validating first-of-a-kind designs with uncertain performance, working as part of a team on multi-scale and multi-physics simulations, testing, and prototyping.
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively.
• Experience with gyrotrons and associated components - transmission systems, launcher antennas, rf loads; experience with plasma physics is a plus.
• Understanding of quasi optical propagation of millimeter waves; ray tracing and where it breaks down

INTERVIEW PROCESS

*This role sits at "L2-L3" of our framework, please inquire during the recruitment process for further information.