Member of Technical Staff - Plasma Physics

Maritime Fusion · San Francisco, CA, US

Y Combinator First seen May 17, 2026

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.