Principal Field Application Engineer - Mountain View, CA, United States
$250,000 - $300,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 12 August 2026 by the employer.
This role involves architecting devices enabled by Lightmatter's Passage photonic interconnect technology.
About the role
What you'll do
- Provide technical support for customer HSIO design, including early technical assessment, design scheme discussion, hardware design review, hardware debug, and troubleshooting.
- Develop and deliver technical proposals to customers based on their technical requirements and system architecture.
- Act as the field expert on HSIO, providing in-depth training and guidance to the FAE team, and creating technical articles and reference designs.
- Collaborate with Lightmatter Engineering to support customer design wins and communicate progress updates to customer engineering leads.
What you'll need
- BS or MS in Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or Computer Science (or equivalent experience).
- 10+ years of work related experience in a high-tech electronics industry with high-speed serial I/O design, including transceiver architecture, CDR, DFE.
- In-depth knowledge of signal integrity and power integrity simulation and related hardware design.
- Familiarity with SI/PI EDA simulation tools and models, such as Keysight ADS.
- Customer facing skills and ability to communicate effectively with customers.
- Previous experience developing and delivering technical presentations to executive management, cross-functional engineering teams, and external clients.
- Experience working with silicon photonics and/or optical transceiver.
- In-depth knowledge of semiconductor and laser technology.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with digital signal processing theory and related tools, like Matlab Simulink.
- Analog signal and mixed signal design, ADC, DAC design experience.
- C, C++ and other software experience.
- Experience working in a customer facing role acting as the domain expert for silicon photonics/optics.
- Experience deploying or supporting customers who are deploying optics in a data center environment at scale.
Skills: HSIO design, photonic interconnect, technical support, customer facing, signal integrity
This role has been open 65 days — slightly above the 59-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · Serdes Highspeed
|
Open roles in category
89
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$183k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Lightmatter | All employers we track in this specialty (89 roles · 23 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 89 |
| Median days open | 65 d | 59 d (+6 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $183k |
Skills observed across this category: HSIO design, photonic interconnect, technical support, customer facing, signal integrity
Who's hiring in this category
- Astera Labs · 16 open roles · median 63 d
- Synopsys · 16 open roles · median 31 d
- Keysight Technologies · 9 open roles · median 46 d
- Qualcomm · 8 open roles · median 69 d
- Microchip Technology · 7 open roles · median 37 d
- Marvell Technology · 5 open roles · median 175 d
How we counted: 89 open Applications FAE (Serdes Highspeed) roles from 23 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 17 Oct 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.