Director, Integrated Target Design

Responsibilities • Build, grow, and lead the Integrated Target Design group, including recruiting, hiring, onboarding, managing, mentoring, and the professional development of staff.

• Convert program priorities into detailed work scopes, schedules, and task assignments for the team.

• Evaluate near-term capability and resource needs and communicate them to program leadership to support effective staffing and toolchain development.

• Uphold and enforce Xcimer’s cultural values of humble ambition, accountable trust, respectful critique, and rigorous urgency.

• Ensure the high‑quality execution of all work by removing obstacles and maintaining clear priorities for the team.

• Work with the Theory and Computation group to ensure modeling capabilities align with design needs.

• Collaborate with the Diagnostic Physics Division (Imaging and Spectroscopy) to ensure researchers have the diagnostic support, interfaces, and coordination needed for high-quality execution of experiments.

• Participate as a technical authority in cross‑functional discussions with laser engineering, target fabrication, chamber engineering, diagnostics, etc.

• Provide day-to-day technical guidance to team members in implosion physics, LPI, symmetry control, and energy coupling strategies.

• Review and validate team outputs for technical quality and consistency Contribute to technical collaborations with national labs, universities, external vendors, and testing facilities.

• Establish department-wide practices, documentation standards, review processes, and quality control appropriate for industrial fusion systems.

Success Measures

• An Integrated Design team with high measures of performance, strong collaborations, and very clear priorities.

• High-quality outputs delivered on schedule and aligned with program goals.

• Strong integration of target physics and implosion design work into experimental platforms that drive system, element, and program level decisions.

• Effective recruiting, mentoring, and development of internal capabilities.

• Consistent delivery of work scopes tied to physics risks and their resolution.

Qualifications • Ph.D. in Physics or Engineering, or a related technical field, with knowledge of ICF.

• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop scientific or technical teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to convey complex arguments to diverse staff in a matrixed organization.

• Ability to manage execution in a fast-moving, interdisciplinary environment, with evolving priorities.

• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident, or lawfully admitted as a refugee or granted asylum.

Desired • Deep expertise in inertial confinement fusion, capsule and hohlraum design, laser-plasma instabilities, hydrodynamics, or a related field.

• Familiarity with radiation‑hydrodynamic modeling workflows, methods in physics validation, and developing or supporting experimental platforms at HED facilities (NIF, OMEGA, Z, or similar).

• Experience in multi‑institutional experimental collaborations.

• Familiarity with topics of interest to IFE including target fabrication, DT filling, cryogenic handling, and/or target injection and delivery.