Senior Optical Engineer - Sunnyvale, CA, United States
About the role
This role involves defining, designing, delivering, and validating optical components and subsystems to meet product-level performance requirements. It is a product engineering position focused on owning optical components and subsystems from requirements definition to sustaining support.
What you'll do
- Own optical design activities for lenses, windows, mirrors, and other optical components, including engineering requirements and specification definition.
- Develop and optimize optical designs using Zemax OpticStudio, CODE V, or equivalent tools, including optimization, tolerancing, and performance modeling.
- Lead optical design execution across internal engineering teams, external design consultants, suppliers, and manufacturing partners.
- Define specifications, acceptance criteria, and validation methods for optical components and assemblies.
- Plan and execute hands-on optical testing and characterization, including MTF, wavefront error (WFE), distortion, and stray-light measurements.
- Develop analysis and automation workflows in Python or equivalent tools to support design, tolerancing, test correlation, and data analysis.
What you'll need
- Master's or Ph.D. in Optical Engineering, Photonics, Physics, or a related field with 3–5+ years of relevant experience, or a bachelor's degree with 7+ years of relevant optical engineering experience.
- Hands-on experience in lens or optical system design.
- Proficiency with Zemax OpticStudio, CODE V, or equivalent optical design and simulation software.
- Strong fundamentals in geometrical and physical optics, imaging systems, and aberration theory.
- Experience with optical tolerancing, sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo analysis, and correlation between simulation and measured hardware performance.
- Hands-on experience with optical testing, characterization, system bring-up, debugging, and validation.
Nice to have
- Experience leading or technically managing optical design work performed by external consultants, optical suppliers, or manufacturing partners.
- Experience supporting optical products through production, including yield improvement, cost reduction, and sustaining engineering.
- Experience with optical component and system measurements including MTF, WFE, distortion, relative illumination, boresight, and stray light.
- Experience using Python or similar tools for optical analysis, test automation, and data analysis.
- Experience working across multidisciplinary teams spanning optics, mechanical, electrical, firmware, DSP, software, manufacturing, and quality.
Skills: optical engineer, optical components, lens and optical component design, Zemax OpticStudio, optical testing
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 63-day median for Optical/Photonics IC Design roles.
Optical/Photonics IC Design · Photonics
|
Open roles in category
121
|
Median days open
63 d
|
Median salary
$195k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Lyte AI | All employers we track in this specialty (121 roles · 32 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 3 | 121 |
| Median days open | 70 d | 63 d (+7 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $195k |
Skills observed across this category: optical engineer, optical components, lens and optical component design, Zemax OpticStudio, optical testing
Who's hiring in this category
- GlobalFoundries · 18 open roles · median 57 d
- Lightmatter · 16 open roles · median 70 d
- Coherent Corp · 15 open roles · median 63 d
- Lumentum · 8 open roles · median 50 d
- PsiQuantum · 6 open roles · median 112 d
- Ayar Labs · 5 open roles · median 47 d
How we counted: 121 open Optical/Photonics IC Design (Photonics) roles from 32 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 23 Sept 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.