Principal Field Application Engineer
LightmatterJob Title
Principal Field Application Engineer
Role Summary
Support customers and partner engineering teams to architect and integrate Lightmatter's Passage photonic interconnect technology into next-generation data-center silicon. Act as the customer-facing technical lead for high-speed serial I/O (HSIO) and photonics integration, working cross-functionally with product, engineering, and field teams.
Experience Level
Senior-level. The role expects 10+ years of relevant industry experience.
Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership and customer-facing engineering support across the HSIO integration lifecycle.
- Perform early technical assessments, architecture discussions, hardware design reviews, and debugging for customer HSIO designs.
- Troubleshoot critical hardware issues and support on-site or remote debug activities as needed.
- Develop and present technical proposals aligned to customer requirements and system architecture.
- Serve as the field expert on HSIO: train and mentor FAE team members, produce reference designs, and publish technical articles.
- Collaborate with Lightmatter engineering to drive customer design wins and communicate progress to customer engineering leads.
- Lead deep technical discussions on high-speed serial links, SerDes, and related protocols with customer domain experts.
Requirements
Must-have technical skills and customer-facing experience.
- 10+ years in high-tech electronics with hands-on experience in high-speed serial I/O design, including transceiver architecture, CDR, and DFE.
- In-depth knowledge of signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) simulation and hardware design; familiarity with SI/PI EDA tools and models (example: Keysight ADS).
- Practical experience with silicon photonics and/or optical transceivers and understanding of semiconductor and laser technologies.
- Strong customer-facing skills: able to communicate complex technical concepts to engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
- Proven analytical and problem-solving abilities and experience supporting customer deployments and debug efforts.
- Experience developing and delivering technical presentations and proposals to internal and external audiences.
- Ability to comply with U.S. export control laws and related export compliance requirements.
Nice-to-have:
- Familiarity with digital signal processing theory and tools such as MATLAB/Simulink.
- Analog/mixed-signal experience (ADC/DAC design).
- Software experience in C/C++ or similar languages.
- Experience supporting optics deployments at data-center scale and acting as a domain expert for customers deploying photonics.
Education Requirements
Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or Computer Science is listed as expected; the posting also allows equivalent practical experience.
About the Company
Company: Lightmatter
Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Lightmatter develops photonic AI data-center infrastructure and optical chips for extreme-scale AI and HPC. The company invented the Passage 3D‑stacked photonics engine to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects across large-scale processors and raised $400M in Series D financing at a reported $4.4B valuation.
