Graduate R&D Engineer - Graduate Scheme 2025

The salary for this role is £32,729.

This role requires employees to complete an online Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS), including The Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) checks for criminal convictions.

UKAEA’s two-year graduate scheme is split by 80% of your time developing both your general work-related skills and professional qualifications and 20% of your working time dedicated to graduate training and development.  Within the graduate training and development, there is a core suite of activities designed to develop your professional and business skills. Elements of this programme are flexible and can be tailored to your personal development needs and to those of your specific job role. 

The Role

The Fusion Technology Division (FT) is taking the UK’s fusion expertise into the age of power plant delivery with a vision to enable the development and qualification of Fusion device equipment for service in commercial fusion power plant. Across the Culham and South Yorkshire sites, we combine a suite of unique testing facilities and capabilities for advanced engineering and world-leading research for international and UK fusion programmes.

Across all the groups and activities within FT, the following themes remain common:  

• Developing and/or incubating new technologies and capabilities to support the commercialisation of Fusion. 
• An increasing focus on verification and qualification, by digital, analytical, deterministic, and probabilistic techniques.  
• Up-scaling activities, from micro-scale verification to prototypical-scale qualification.   
• Serving a dual role as both service provider to and informed customer for commercial Fusion. 
• Ensuring specialist recruitment and training satisfy a broad range of Fusion stakeholder needs. 

The Technology Development Group are responsible for providing projects and programmes across the organisation with the skills and knowledge required to bring low maturity ideas through to application-ready engineering solutions. The projects our we work on are diverse; for example: 

• Developing efficient and realisable testing programmes for major research and power-plant design programmes. 
• Defining new test rig and facility requirements, supporting their development, and managing commissioning and exploitation. 
• Delivering technology maturation projects from proof of concept through to commercially relevant technologies, including the planning and delivery of benchtop testing, 
• Operating and enhancing our existing range of flexible test facilities, 
• Researching potential applications of fusion technologies in other industries. 

Due to the variety of our work, there’s no such thing as a typical day for our Technology Development Graduate Engineers but you can expect to leverage your curiosity and passion for continuous learning; work on projects in technical areas to which you may not have previously had exposure, and work in an innovation focused environment where there may be significant uncertainty and problems may be open-ended.  If this appeals, we would like to hear from you. 

Essential Requirements:

• Successful completion of a relevant degree or equivalent level in a relevant STEM Discipline; within the past 2 years. 
• Demonstrable ability to question existing scientific models, able to express this clearly through high quality written reports.  
•  IT literate, fluent in Microsoft Office, including Excel and SharePoint.  
• Demonstrate excellent interpersonal and communication skills. 
• Good planning, organising and time management skills. 
• Discreet & professional approach to technical or scientific activities. 
• Manage own development towards building knowledge & skills. 
• Excellent presentation skills. 

A full list of our benefits can be found here https://careers.ukaea.uk/life-at-ukaea/employee-benefits/

We welcome applications from under-represented groups, particularly individuals from black and other ethnic minority backgrounds, people with disabilities, and women. Our Executive team, supported by our 'Equality, Diversity and Inclusion' (EDI) Partner and Inclusion Ambassadors, actively promotes EDI and takes steps to increase diversity within our organization. We reinforce best practices in recruitment and selection and evaluate approaches to remove barriers to success.

Please note that vacancies are generally advertised for 4 weeks but may close earlier if we receive a large number of applications.