Senior Photonic-Integrated-Circuit Integration Engineer - California, Santa Clara, United States
$190,610 - $311,890 USD yearly
Originally posted 14 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a Senior Photonic-Integrated-Circuit Integration Engineer, you will define, design, and optimize silicon photonic integrated circuits. This role contributes to chip development for AI datacenter scale-up, laser sources, and co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.
What you'll do
- Architect, design, and optimize complex active and passive silicon photonic integrated circuits.
- Develop and execute plans for chip design, layout, tape out, test, validation, and performance debug.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with foundries, validation teams, manufacturers, and quality/reliability groups.
- Conduct data analysis, reliability, qualification, and delivery of known-good-die solutions.
- Design and simulate photonic integrated circuit systems using advanced modeling tools.
- Drive high-volume manufacturing (HVM) enabling flows and ensure seamless integration of photonic technologies.
- Develop technical documentation and test content to support the silicon photonics chip lifecycle.
What you'll need
- Master's degree in relevant fields and 8+ years of industry experience OR a PhD with 6+ years of industry experience.
- Experience in development of photonic-integrated-circuits from concept to high volume manufacturing (HVM).
- Experience designing, simulating, and testing complex PIC's, including link budget analysis, electrical power budgets, back-reflection budgets, and Monte Carlo models.
- Familiarity using optical design and simulation tools such as Lumerical (FDTD, MODE, DEVICE, Interconnect), RSoft, Tidy3D, Harold, Photon Design, Matlab or Python.
- Experience contributing to or leading PIC tape-outs.
- Familiarity with layout tools such as Candence, KLayout, Synopsys Optocompiler, or GDSFactory.
Nice to have
- Exposure to standard photonic test methodologies and equipment such as optical spectrum analyzers, tunable lasers, optical backscatter reflectometers, optical vector analyzers, fiber or free-space coupling.
- Exposure to EDA/PDA tools and methodologies.
- Familiarity with LVS, SDL, and DRC.
- PIC test data analysis and design optimization using statistical analysis with tools such as JMP or statistical libraries in matlab or python.
Skills: silicon photonic integrated circuits, PIC design, Lumerical, PIC tape-outs, co-packaged optics
This role has been open 51 days — well below the 67-day median for Optical/Photonics IC Design roles.
Optical/Photonics IC Design · Photonics
|
Open roles in category
133
|
Median days open
67 d
|
Median salary
$195k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Intel Corporation | All employers we track in this specialty (133 roles · 33 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 6 | 133 |
| Median days open | 48 d | 67 d (−19 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $195k |
Skills observed across this category: silicon photonic integrated circuits, PIC design, Lumerical, PIC tape-outs, co-packaged optics
Who's hiring in this category
- Lightmatter · 18 open roles · median 81 d
- GlobalFoundries · 16 open roles · median 67 d
- Coherent Corp · 15 open roles · median 75 d
- Lumentum · 9 open roles · median 62 d
- Keysight Technologies · 7 open roles · median 31 d
- Marvell Technology · 7 open roles · median 151 d
How we counted: 133 open Optical/Photonics IC Design (Photonics) roles from 33 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 5 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.