Optical Networking Engineer

Location: Gardena, CA

Mesh Optical Technologies was founded on the belief that optical photons will be at the center of advanced technologies in the coming century. Making advanced technology ubiquitous means building at scale, and that's exactly what we're doing at Mesh.

We're seeking an Optical Networking Engineer to lead the network-level design of our optical interconnect solutions — trading network architectures, evaluating routing and switching hardware, and engineering signal performance across customer fabrics, then carrying those designs through validation and deployment. This is a role for an engineer who can reason from the topology down to the link, weigh hardware trade-offs across switch, NIC, and optical platforms, and translate a design into the documentation that makes it deployable at scale.

Responsibilities

• Trade and evaluate network architectures and interconnect topologies to guide how Mesh optical hardware is designed into and optimized across customer networks
• Design end-to-end optical interconnect solutions at the network level, specifying transceivers, fiber plant, cabling, and link configurations to meet reach, bandwidth, latency, and performance targets
• Conduct routing and switching hardware trade studies, evaluating switch, router, and NIC platforms across radix, port speed, and fabric scaling to inform interconnect design decisions
• Own network-level signal and optical performance, including link budgets, modulation-format trade-offs (NRZ, PAM4), BER/OSNR/OMA, receiver sensitivity, and FEC margin across the deployed link
• Model and analyze link and channel performance to predict behavior across topologies and operating conditions, and use those results to drive design and deployment choices
• Develop comprehensive deployment documentation — interconnect design guides, commissioning checklists, integration and application notes, and field service procedures that enable repeatable, high-quality deployments as the customer base scales
• Define and execute characterization, interoperability, and qualification test plans validating optical link performance within Ethernet, InfiniBand, and other high-speed interconnect architectures, including switch and NIC platforms from major vendors
• Lead bring-up, link validation, and acceptance testing of Mesh optical hardware in the lab and on-site within customer network environments
• Diagnose and resolve hardware, firmware, software, and link-level issues across optical, electrical, and firmware boundaries, including optical power and signal-quality troubleshooting, module register debug, host interface bring-up, and system-level fault isolation
• Support module management interface bring-up and debug, including CMIS configuration, diagnostics page interpretation, and firmware update workflows