Photonic Architect
Posted 13 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Photonic Architect, Temp ”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
- Contract
- Contract
No salary listed for this role.
Field of studyElectrical Engineering, Optics, Photonics
Study levelDoctorate
Lightmatter is leading the revolution in AI data center infrastructure, enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company invented the world’s first 3D-stacked photonics engine, Passage™, capable of connecting thousands to millions of processors at the speed of light in extreme-scale data centers for the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.
Lightmatter raised $400 million in its Series D round, reaching a valuation of $4.4 billion. We will continue to accelerate the development of data center photonics and grow every department at Lightmatter!
If you're passionate about tackling complex challenges, making an impact, and being an expert in your craft, join our team of brilliant scientists, engineers, and accomplished industry leaders.
Lightmatter is (re)inventing the future of computing with light!
We are hiring a temporary employee at the PhD level for our Photonics Architecture team at Lightmatter! We are an optical interconnects company enabling the next generation of power efficient AI datacenters. With an increasingly large number of processor chips needing to be networked together to support the growing demands of AI, Lightmatter is creating engines that send data between processors using photons instead of electrons. Optical interconnections enable energy-efficient and high-speed communication links between the processors.
Responsibilities
- You will be part of the Passage transceiver product architecture team, focused on Photonic Architecture.
- You will focus on the interaction between photonic effects and the performance of SerDes, drivers and TIAs. You will find creative solutions to maintain excellent error rates in our optical communications products, at ever-increasing throughput and density.
- You will simulate end to end optical links, focusing on detailed optical effects such as fiber polarization, optical reflections, and thermal dynamics in silicon photonic structures. You will collaborate with our test team, to run remote testing on Lightmatter hardware, including SerDes, high-speed analog, and photonic chips. You will define test plans, and correlate test results with your simulations.
Qualifications
- Pursuing a PhD in Photonics, Optics, or Electrical Engineering with a specialization in optical communications.
- Experience with optical link simulations in commercial tools such as VPIphotonics, Matlab, Virtuoso or ADS.
- Highly motivated to learn about commercial applications of silicon photonics and optical communications.
- Courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in electromagnetics (wave propagation, guided waves), semiconductor devices, semiconductor physics, optics, scientific computing, numerical methods, signals and systems, statistics, thermal physics, analog electronics.