Outage Planning Engineer

About the role

You will plan the refueling outages where a nuclear plant earns its future reliability for a power utility, orchestrating thousands of work activities into a schedule measured in days. The team develops scope, builds the critical path, manages risk, and drives execution readiness. You will challenge scope, sequence work, and ensure every hour of the outage has a purpose. This role matters because every outage day costs roughly a million dollars in replacement power, and your planning determines whether the plant returns to service on time and better than it left. You will also develop contingency plans for the highest-risk outage activities, because the schedule that assumes perfection is the schedule that fails. Your daily outage meetings will be crisp and decisive, keeping thousands of workers aligned. You will integrate emergent work with minimal disruption, protecting the critical path fiercely. Your post-outage critiques will be honest about what failed, ensuring the same mistakes never repeat.

What you will achieve

• Deliver outage schedules with critical path durations meeting or beating industry benchmarks for the work scope.
• Complete scope freeze and readiness reviews with all work packages fully prepared before the outage starts.
• Manage emergent work during execution, keeping schedule additions under 5 percent of baseline scope.
• Reduce outage duration year over year through scope optimization and parallel work planning.
• Capture lessons learned with actionable improvements implemented in the next outage cycle.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2 to 5 years in outage planning, work management, or project planning at a nuclear facility.
• Proficiency with scheduling tools such as Primavera P6 including critical path methodology.
• Understanding of nuclear outage work: refueling, maintenance, testing, and startup sequencing.
• Ability to challenge work scope constructively, eliminating low-value work that extends outages.
• Risk management skills: identifying schedule threats and building credible contingencies.
• Composure during execution: outages are intense, and your planning must hold under pressure.
• Coordination across dozens of work groups with competing demands on shared resources.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with online work management and the transition between online and outage work.
• Familiarity with industry outage performance benchmarking (INPO, WANO).
• Knowledge of risk-informed outage planning and shutdown safety requirements.
• Project management certification (PMP) or equivalent training.