Principal Real-Time Software Engineer
Thea Energy6 days ago
Base Salary
$200k - $230k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop the architecture and implementation of the Eos real-time framework across execution services, component interfaces, deployment, diagnostics, and control-subsystem integration.
- Evaluate MARTe2 and other fusion real-time frameworks and develop prototypes and performance measurements to guide reuse, adaptation, or custom development decisions.
- Define measurable requirements, timing budgets, acceptance criteria, and modular interfaces for real-time control applications.
- Build production-quality C/C++ services for multirate execution, scheduling, interprocess communication, shared memory, signal exchange, and application lifecycle management.
- Tune real-time Linux platforms and eliminate sources of unpredictable latency through CPU affinity, memory locking, NUMA placement, scheduling policies, and bounded concurrency.
- Develop hardware abstraction, I/O, data-exchange, timing, and synchronization interfaces for digitizers, FPGA systems, power-supply controllers, diagnostic equipment, and distributed systems.
- Integrate control algorithms, observers, estimators, diagnostics, supervisory controls, PLCs, interlocks, machine protection, data infrastructure, and simulation interfaces.
- Develop automated functional, integration, regression, timing, fault-injection, endurance, and recovery tests on representative hardware.
- Participate in laboratory integration and commissioning, diagnose issues across software, operating systems, networks, and hardware, and convert findings into durable improvements.
- Contribute to architecture reviews, coding and interface standards, technical documentation, operating procedures, and collaboration with laboratories, framework maintainers, researchers, and suppliers.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, physics, or a related discipline, or equivalent demonstrated professional experience.
- Typically 10 or more years of relevant software engineering experience, including substantial responsibility for complex real-time system architecture and delivery.
- Hands-on experience developing, deploying, and supporting real-time control, plasma control, machine protection, or real-time diagnostic systems.
- Substantial contributions to reusable real-time software platforms or major framework capabilities across requirements, architecture, implementation, and validation.
- Expertise in C and modern C++, including concurrency, atomic operations, memory models, resource ownership, and execution-time and memory-use control.
- Deep practical experience with Linux-based real-time systems such as RedHawk Linux or PREEMPT_RT and diagnosing latency across application code, the kernel, hardware, and I/O.
- Experience with an established fusion real-time framework or plasma-control infrastructure such as MARTe2, ITER real-time infrastructure, or an equivalent deployed system.
- Experience integrating high-speed data acquisition and hardware I/O with distributed communication, timing, and synchronization for feedback control.
- Strong practices in version control, code review, automated testing, reproducible builds, configuration management, and technical documentation.
- Preferred experience includes MARTe2 development, fusion and superconducting magnet systems, EPICS, MDSplus, ITER CODAC, NI PXI, CompactRIO, Speedgoat, MATLAB/Simulink, LabVIEW Real-Time, FPGA interfaces, PTP, hardware triggers, event timing, PCIe/DMA, RDMA, AI/ML inference, CPU/GPU integration, reusable scientific software, open-source projects, or fusion-controls publications.
- Ability to occasionally lift up to 50 lbs, work extended periods while typing, standing, or sitting, occasionally travel or work nights, weekends, or on-call, and work around industrial hazards including high voltage, high current, strong magnets, and cryogenics.
Benefits
- Salary range of $200,000-$230,000 per year.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
- Employee equity stock options.
- 20 days of paid time off.
- Occasional travel and required nights, weekends, or on-call work may be part of the role.
- Work is performed in a facility containing industrial hazards, heat, cold, noise, fumes, strong magnets, high voltage, high current, pressure systems, and cryogenics.
About Thea Energy
Thea Energy develops a stellarator-based fusion power system using arrays of mass-manufacturable planar magnets and dynamic software controls, aimed at utility-scale zero-emission electricity. The privately held company, founded in 2022 and headquartered in Kearny, New Jersey, spun out of Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. It was selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and has ARPA-E SCALEUP support, as it advances from prototype toward commercial power plants.