Staff Photonics Design Engineer — Lasers

Job Title

Staff Photonics Design Engineer — Lasers

Role Summary

Design, layout, and validate silicon photonics devices and integrated laser subsystems for high-scale AI/HPC data center products. The role works within the photonics development team and partners closely with packaging, systems, characterization, and software teams to deliver production-ready laser solutions.

This is a hands-on engineering position focused on device-level design, simulation, testing, and integration to meet product requirements.

Experience Level

Senior level (Staff). The posting specifies a PhD plus approximately 3 years of industry experience.

Responsibilities

Deliver device designs, validate performance, and support system integration across the product development lifecycle.

• Design and optimize silicon photonic devices for laser systems (couplers, muxes, rings, switches, active and passive components).
• Layout device test structures and complex integrated photonic systems.
• Develop and execute device validation test plans with the characterization team; analyze results and troubleshoot performance issues.
• Work with packaging and systems engineering to address integration and alignment challenges.
• Implement simulation, modeling, and testing methodologies to calibrate designs and account for manufacturing variability.
• Contribute to new device designs and architectures and support publication/presentation of novel results at optics/photonics conferences.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and capabilities, plus preferred skills.

• Industry experience in silicon photonics device design, layout, and testing in a product development environment.
• Practical experience with photonic simulation tools such as Lumerical, Tidy3D, or equivalent.
• Proficiency in modeling and data analysis using Python.
• Experience with integrated lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs).
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across multidisciplinary teams.
• Proven problem-solving skills on ambiguous technical problems and a proactive, can-do attitude.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience doing layout with foundry PDKs.
• Experience with code-based GDS creation (e.g., GDS Factory) or similar workflows.
• Familiarity with optical/electronic test equipment, wafer-level testing, and statistical data analysis (optical spectrum analyzers, tunable lasers, OBR/OVA, oscilloscopes, BERT).
• Strong project execution skills and ability to meet milestones across multiple priorities.

Education Requirements

PhD in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Photonics, or a closely related discipline. The posting specifies approximately 3 years of industry experience in addition to the PhD.

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.