Senior Photonics Engineer

Design silicon photonic devices, subcircuits, and PICs using Lumerical and FDTD simulation through tapeout.

About the role

As a Senior Photonics Engineer on the Photonics Design and Architecture team, you will design silicon photonic devices, subcircuits, and photonic integrated circuits (PICs). You will have end-to-end technical ownership of assigned components and subcircuits from simulation and layout through design verification, tapeout, and documentation.

What you'll do

• Design passive and active silicon and silicon nitride devices, including couplers, splitters, interferometers, polarization-management components, phase shifters, switches, and optical interfaces.
• Simulate and optimize device performance against insertion loss, bandwidth, polarization response, footprint, power, and fabrication tolerance using electromagnetic, optical-circuit, and thermal simulation.
• Implement component and subcircuit layouts adhering to foundry design rules, execute design-rule checks, and prepare design files for integration into full PIC layouts.
• Verify designs, evaluate nominal performance and process sensitivity, and present results in design reviews and tapeout signoff.
• Build Python tools for simulation setup, parameter sweeps, optimization, layout generation, and data analysis.
• Collaborate with the silicon team to define test structures, characterization objectives, and design-of-experiment (DOE) splits, delivering complete design handoffs for production transfer.

What you'll need

• M.S. or Ph.D. in electrical engineering, physics, optics, or a related discipline, or a B.S. with equivalent industry experience.
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience (or a Ph.D. with 5+ years).
• Hands-on experience designing silicon or silicon nitride active and passive photonic components, with design ownership on multiple completed PIC tapeouts.
• Strong understanding of waveguide optics, semiconductor device physics, and fabrication-dependent device performance.
• Proficiency with electromagnetic simulation methods such as FDTD, eigenmode solvers, and eigenmode expansion (EME), as well as optical-circuit simulation with Lumerical, Tidy3D, or equivalent.
• Experience with schematic driven layout in Cadence or Synopsys, foundry design rules, and pre-tapeout design verification including LVS/DRC.
• Proficiency in Python for scientific computing, simulation automation, and data analysis.

Nice to have

• Experience developing PCells, compact models, and PDK component libraries.
• Exposure to III–V devices and understanding of lasers, semiconductor optical amplifiers, including hybrid or heterogeneous integration with silicon photonics.
• Exposure to optical packaging, micro-optics, or free-space coupling.
• Experience correlating simulated device behavior with measured results.
• Familiarity with statistical variation analysis (e.g., Monte Carlo and corner analysis) and numerical optimization.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical design reviews.

Skills: PIC, silicon photonics, FDTD, Lumerical, waveguide, tapeout

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