Opto-Mechanical Engineer IV (E4) - Hillsboro, OR, United States

Originally posted 5 October 2026 by the employer.

About the role

This role involves leveraging a strong foundation in physics, mathematics, and materials science to process and resolve mechanical problems, designing custom mechanical tooling, and enabling the handling, assembly, and disassembly of parts throughout the product lifecycle.

What you'll do

• Lead and/or design the opto-mechanical solution of complex subsystems.
• Identify and troubleshoot complex mechanical problems.
• Develop detailed component and assembly drawings to meet tight tolerancing requirements.
• Perform mechanical analyses to ensure performance stability under operational and environmental conditions.
• Design sub-assemblies to achieve sub-micron alignment and long-term stability.
• Define and own the opto-mechanical interface between optical, mechanical, and electrical subsystems.

What you'll need

• Bachelor’s degree
• 5+ years of experience
• Sound material selection judgment, including intuition for thermal expansion behavior and appropriate tolerance ratios.
• Demonstrated ability to design for strength, rigidity, cost and manufacturability.
• Hands-on tooling and jig design.
• Experience working directly with machine shops.
• Experience with electronics packaging.
• Experience with liquid cooling systems, pneumatics and fittings.
• Fluency in geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, and in statistical as well as worst-case tolerance analysis.
• Experience designing for precision mounting, positioning, pointing and long-term stability of optical components.
• Hands-on proficiency with finite element analysis for structural, thermal, modal or fluid problems.
• Structural-Thermal-Optical Performance analysis experience.
• Working familiarity with wavefront theory.
• Able to operate a commercial interferometer for optical characterization.
• Familiarity with reference flats, spheres and prisms.
• Advanced practical experience adapting common optical measurement tooling: power and energy probes, cameras, profilers, stages and encoders, alignment telescopes and position-sensitive detectors.
• Experience setting up and using waveform generators, oscilloscopes, multimeters and power supplies.
• Expert operation of a commercial optical inspection microscope.
• Able to interpret optical drawings, and to interpret or modify an existing optical model.
• Laser and imaging alignment technique and intuition across millimeter to nanometer scales.
• Adept at improvising opto-mechanical mounting, measurement, reference and alignment tooling from off-the-shelf components.
• Loose-optic handling, inspection and cleaning; fiber handling, inspection, cleaning and integration.
• Experience safely operating Class 4 lasers.
• Comfortable interpreting, reviewing, lightly editing and extending existing code.
• Able to perform regression testing and contribute to a software feedback and improvement cycle.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of the Applied Materials product life cycle, including prototyping, packaging, material selection and manufacturing methods.
• Measurement system analysis practice: gauge repeatability and reproducibility, uncertainty budgeting, calibration and traceability.
• Highly adept at rapidly prototyping controls or analysis applications in Python, with change management in a Git-style repository.
• Able to develop requirements and specifications for a software utility and coordinate with stakeholders to bring it to production.
• From-scratch automation of new or legacy laboratory equipment, across interfaces from serial through to compiled-language integration.
• Experience transferring designs to manufacturing and supporting remotely and on site.