Senior Simulation Engineer, Computational Physics

Proxima Fusion is Europe’s fastest-growing fusion company and the continent’s best-funded fusion player, and the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. Backed by more than 650 million euros, the company is developing the hardware and infrastructure needed to deliver the world’s first commercial stellarator fusion power plant, advancing the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator concept through two next-generation machines, Alpha and Stellaris. This Senior Simulation Engineer owns a selected set of models spanning domains from microwave physics to plasma radiation, used by the design team to compute load cases, assess system-level tradeoffs, run numerical optimization, and simulate the whole machine as a single system, from input and output definitions through implementation correctness and software efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

• Identify and implement simulators, either building one from scratch or wrapping an existing tool into Proxima’s platform, and ensure the model is properly interfaced with the codebase
• Co-define input and output interfaces with engineering teams, updating the data model so it correctly captures the relevant design specifications
• Ensure simulation pipelines are tested, verified and validated as the design evolves, and help scope and contribute to validation in hardware tests where needed
• Exercise the models through dedicated studies that inform design tradeoffs for the integrated design team
• Expose simulators as a service to humans and agents, creating dashboards, online tools and interactive reports to visualize model predictions and uncertainties

Requirements

Essential: PhD or Master’s in physics, engineering, or an adjacent field, with experience building simulation tools encompassing numerical algorithms, geometry and physics; comfort working across the complex 3D geometry of a stellarator and the many physics phenomena occurring within one; software engineering fluency, including familiarity with git, CI/CD, the PyData stack, and autodifferentiation packages such as JAX or PyTorch, with a track record of building real tools rather than scripts; ability to choose the appropriate tool for a given simulation need, whether a simple simulator or a commercial multiphysics package; a proactive working style, finding gaps before they become problems and prioritizing and arguing for next steps independently.

Desirable: none specified in the source listing.