Chief Engineer, Prototype System Integration and Experimentation - Austin, Texas, United States

Originally posted 5 October 2026 by the employer.

This role focuses on a prototype system spanning optical sources, electro-optic modulation, high-speed mixed-signal electronics, and a programmable photonic compute element.

About the role

This role involves owning the technical execution of a first fully integrated prototype system, which includes optical sources, electro-optic modulation, high-speed mixed-signal electronics, a programmable photonic compute element, and their associated firmware and host software. This prototype system will serve as the company's permanent experimental platform for optical computing, quantifying how individual optical and electrical impairments propagate into end-to-end computational accuracy.

What you'll do

• Own, maintain, and defend the end-to-end system performance budget, identifying dominant performance-limiting elements and driving trade studies.
• Define and maintain the system architecture, requirements, and interface definitions for all subsystems and suppliers.
• Serve as the technical counterpart to external design houses and component vendors, reviewing designs and verifying specifications.
• Critically evaluate mixed-signal and high-speed electronic designs, as well as optical and opto-mechanical designs, for correctness and margin.
• Plan and lead the integration sequence, define acceptance criteria, and drive laboratory bring-up and debug of the assembled system.
• Design and execute controlled experiments to quantify the effect of individual optical and electrical impairments on end-to-end computational accuracy.

What you'll need

• 15+ years of professional experience developing complex multi-disciplinary hardware systems, with at least 3 years as a responsible system-level engineer or technical lead.
• Demonstrated ownership of at least one system from architecture definition through design, integration, laboratory bring-up, and experimental characterization.
• Proven ability to construct and maintain requirements sets, interface control documents, verification matrices, and quantitative performance budgets.
• Demonstrated ability to design experiments that isolate a single physical mechanism within a system.
• Strong working knowledge of analog and high-speed electronics, including data-converter interfacing, transmission lines, and power integrity.
• Deep understanding of impairment mechanisms that limit real optical and mixed-signal systems, such as thermal, shot, and flicker noise, and component mismatch.
• Solid understanding of optical system fundamentals, including sources, fiber and free-space propagation, and electro-optic modulation.
• Working fluency in linear algebra, signal processing, and modulation and encoding theory.
• Experience acting as the technical authority over external design houses, contract manufacturers, or component vendors.
• Sufficient understanding of embedded firmware, FPGA-based control, and host-side software architecture to specify and review software interfaces.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or MATLAB for performance budgeting, test automation, measurement data analysis, and system-level modeling.

Skills: prototype system integration, optical sources, electro-optic modulation, high-speed mixed-signal electronics, photonic compute element, system performance budget