Staff / Senior Staff Electrical Design Engineer

Job Title

Staff / Senior Staff Electrical Design Engineer

Role Summary

Lead system- and board-level electrical design for silicon-photonics AI accelerators and interconnect products. Collaborate with hardware and software teams, mechanical, packaging, and IC engineering to design, integrate, validate, and release manufacturable high-performance systems for data center AI and HPC applications.

Focus areas include power, memory, and high-speed interconnect circuits, PCB design oversight, lab validation, and production support.

Experience Level

Senior — typical: 8+ years of relevant system-level electrical design experience.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include:

• Define and translate system-level hardware requirements with architects and technical leads.
• Design electrical circuits for power, memory, and interconnect in analog and digital domains.
• Select electrical and optical components to meet IC and photonics specifications.
• Develop conceptual designs, modeling and simulations for chip-modules and systems.
• Oversee and review PCB layouts; provide electrical constraint rules and ensure manufacturability and yield.
• Qualify chip and system electrical properties and perform laboratory validation.
• Lead cross-functional integration and troubleshoot prototypes with mechanical, packaging, software, and IC teams.
• Support contract manufacturers during prototype and production to resolve issues and work with vendors/suppliers.
• Research and evaluate new components, processes, and technologies to meet product goals.

Requirements

Must-have skills and experience:

• 8+ years of system-level electrical design with multiple products taken from concept to production.
• Proficient in schematic design tools (Altium preferred; Cadence or Mentor acceptable).
• In-depth knowledge of VRMs, high-speed SERDES, CPUs and interfaces/protocols such as PCIe, Ethernet, QSPI, I3C, I2C.
• 5+ years of lab experimentation, non-intrusive circuit debugging, and leading cross-functional integration teams.
• Experience with thermal solutions for ICs and board-level systems.
• Familiarity with PLM tools (Oracle Agile, Arena, Omnify) and BOM/ECO management.
• Experience supporting contract manufacturing and working with component vendors.
• Ability to comply with U.S. export control requirements.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience designing electrical systems for networking or similar industries.
• Familiarity with IC layout considerations and carrier PCBA design.
• Knowledge of common manufacturing and design processes and Systems Engineering principles.
• Experience with 3D mechanical CAD tools (SolidWorks, AutoCAD).

Education Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering.

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.