Staff Computational Materials Scientist

About the role

The Materials and Processing (M&P) Department at Commonwealth Fusion Systems supports design engineers, supply chain, and manufacturing by selecting and validating materials for fusion power plants. This position will develop physics‑based models, synthetic data, and first‑principles simulations to predict material behavior in extreme environments for the SPARC tokamak and future ARC plant.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain computational toolsets and workflows to predict material properties under high temperature, radiation, and magnetic fields, including uncertainty quantification.
• Identify chemical and microstructural features that drive performance, and quantify their impact for engineering optimization.
• Design experiments for materials exposed to simultaneous corrosion, stress, irradiation, magnetic and electric fields.
• Collaborate with design and analysis engineers to create material design curves and statistical minimum property criteria for tokamak applications.
• Benchmark models, create metrics for material property variability, and support data capture, storage, visualization, and analysis.

Required profile

• Advanced degree in Materials Science, Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, Physical Chemistry, Computer Science or related field.
• Minimum 10 + years of experience in experimental or computational materials science.
• Proven experience using ICME tools and computational materials science methods across length scales.
• Demonstrated ability to validate models with experimental data and to communicate findings across cross‑functional teams.

Required skills

• Atomistic modeling, molecular dynamics, density functional theory, Monte Carlo, phase‑field, crystal plasticity, dislocation dynamics, computational thermodynamics.
• Finite element analysis, scientific computing, numerical algorithms, advanced statistical methods.
• High‑performance computing, distributed processing, GPU acceleration, message‑passing interfaces.
• Strong programming and code development for material property calculations.

What we offer

• Salary range $130,000 – $200,000 per year plus equity.
• Competitive benefits: 13 company‑wide holidays, flexible vacation, 10 sick days, generous parental leave, health/dental/vision insurance, 401(k) with employer match.
• Professional growth opportunities and team‑building activities.