Sr. Staff Engineer, Modeling Infrastructure and Software Development
$170,000 - $223,000 USD yearly
Ayar Labs develops a silicon photonics optical I/O platform.
About the role
As a Sr. Staff Engineer, Modeling Infrastructure and Software Development, you will be the software and compute backbone behind Ayar Labs' silicon photonics optical I/O platform. You will build the compute, data, and software foundation for a team modeling optical links end-to-end, from photonic devices through circuits and signal processing to statistical analyses.
What you'll do
- Own the team's software development and compute environment, including reproducible Python environments, containerized workflows, CI/CD, data standards, and versioned releases of internal modeling packages.
- Operate and scale simulation and statistical analysis workloads across HPC (SLURM) and AWS environments.
- Design and maintain data schemas and interfaces for devices, measurements, model parameters, and simulation results.
- Build and operate data ingestion, cleaning, and curation pipelines for raw measurement and foundry data.
- Partner with photonics, circuits, and signal-processing engineers to evolve research prototypes into packaged tools.
What you'll need
- Degree in Computer Science, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Optics/Photonics, or a related field.
- 5+ years building and maintaining software and compute infrastructure for numerical simulation, engineering modeling, or large-scale technical data analysis.
- Strong Python skills with the scientific stack (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, networkx, or similar) applied to numerical or data-analysis problems.
- Track record of owning an internal tooling or open-source codebase through multiple release cycles.
- Hands-on operation of batch compute at scale: SLURM (or an equivalent HPC scheduler) and/or AWS-based scientific compute, including environment management, containers, and CI.
- Experience designing data schemas and APIs consumed by other engineers or scientists.
- Fluency on Linux and with modern developer tooling (Git, CI, containers).
Nice to have
- Working knowledge of at least one of: photonic device physics, circuits, signal processing, or statistical analysis.
- Contributions to open-source scientific software.
- Experience with modern data management architectures (e.g., data lakehouse patterns), metadata standards, and query engines.
- Hands-on experience applying AI tools and agentic workflows to engineering or data pipelines.
- Proficiency in C/C++ or another compiled language used alongside Python in scientific codebases.
- Prior work on compact models, SPICE-like simulators, or link/yield statistical modeling.
Skills: Python, HPC, SLURM, AWS, CI/CD, data schemas
More semiconductor jobs: San Jose jobs
This role has been open 89 days — well above the 53-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
1022
|
Median days open
53 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$236k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Ayar Labs | All employers we track in this specialty (1022 roles · 93 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 2 | 1022 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 24 | 6531 · 156 employers |
| Median days open | 68 d | 53 d (+15 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $236k |
Skills observed across this category: Python, HPC, SLURM, AWS, CI/CD, data schemas
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 335 open roles · median 58 d
- AMD · 55 open roles · median 36 d
- Qualcomm · 55 open roles · median 61 d
- Graphcore · 48 open roles · median 101 d
- Intel Corporation · 38 open roles · median 24 d
- Arm Holdings · 37 open roles · median 11 d
How we counted: 1022 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 93 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 — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.