Principal Engineer, Communication Protocol Architect
$180,000 - $250,000 USD yearly
About the role
You will work with customers and internal design teams to design co-packaged optical engines for scale-up and scale-out fabrics and extended memory, developing specifications for network and compute protocol stack layers. You will also represent Ayar Labs at Standard Setting Organizations and collaborate with the CTO office on pathfinding and technology roadmaps.
What you'll do
- Work with customers and internal design teams to design co-packaged optical engines for scale-up and scale-out fabrics and extended memory.
- Translate customer interconnect specifications into protocol requirements to enable silicon photonic interconnects.
- Architect and develop the specification of network/compute protocol stack layers, including application, transaction, data link, and physical layers in optical engines.
- Participate in Standard Setting Organization workgroups at UALink, ESUN, OCP, OIF, and IEEE 802.3.
- Support technology evangelization through customer presentations, conference papers, seminars, and webinars.
What you'll need
- B.S. degree in Computer or Electrical Engineering.
- Experience with memory semantic fabrics and networking protocols such as AXI, CHI, UALink, ESUN, Ethernet (e.g., 802.3dj), UCIe, and PCI-SIG.
- Experience with the architecture and design of AI compute systems such as OCI-MSA.
- Programming skills in Python and familiarity with AI workflow agents.
Nice to have
- M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer or Electrical Engineering.
- Experience with AI inference models and system performance analysis covering throughput, interactivity, and TCO.
- Experience with network topologies such as mesh, crossbar, folded Clos, TOR, Leaf-Spine, Torus, Dragonfly, and HyperX.
- Experience with Amazon AWS and Google Cloud platforms.
More semiconductor jobs: Photonics jobs · San Jose jobs
This role has been open 52 days — well below the 71-day median for Optical/Photonics IC Design roles.
Optical/Photonics IC Design · Photonics
|
Open roles in category
161
|
Median days open
71 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$194k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Ayar Labs | All employers we track in this specialty (161 roles · 35 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 11 | 161 |
| Median days open | 1 d | 71 d (−70 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $194k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Coherent Corp · 17 open roles · median 109 d
- GlobalFoundries · 13 open roles · median 80 d
- Ayar Labs (this employer) · 11 open roles · median 1 d
- Lightmatter · 11 open roles · median 116 d
- Lumentum · 10 open roles · median 96 d
- Marvell Technology · 10 open roles · median 51 d
How we counted: 161 open Optical/Photonics IC Design (Photonics) roles from 35 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 8 Nov 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Figures refresh nightly.