Principal PIC (Photonic Integrated Circuit) Design Engineer

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Lead system-level architecture and design of large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), integrating hundreds to thousands of active and passive photonic devices.
• Define chip-level optical architectures, link budgets, and performance trade-offs across insertion loss, crosstalk, bandwidth, power consumption, and thermal management.
• Drive top-level chip integration, floorplanning, optical routing, and design-for-manufacturability (DFM) strategies for high-yield silicon photonics tapeouts.
• Contribute to photonic component library development
• Serve as top-level tapeout owner, managing design verification (DRC/LVS) and foundry tapeout execution
• Provide technical leadership across multidisciplinary teams, collaborating closely with component designers, packaging engineers, electronic IC (EIC) designers, and system software engineers.
• Guide wafer- and chip-level characterization strategies to evaluate full PIC performance against system-level requirements and drive iterative design updates.
• Establish and maintain technical relationships with foundry partners to evaluate next-generation process design kits (PDKs) and platform capabilities.

Job requirements

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Photonics, or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design, including electromagnetic simulation, active and passive component optimization, and top-level chip layout/floorplanning.
• Proven track record of taking complex silicon photonics designs through full foundry tapeouts (DRC/LVS) and successful silicon validation/characterization.
• Deep expertise in photonic device physics, optical waveguide theory, silicon and silicon nitride fabrication processes, and design-for-manufacturability (DFM) principles.
• Proficiency with industry-standard simulation and layout tools (e.g., Ansys Lumerical, Tidy3D, COMSOL, KLayout, and gdsfactory).
• Experience with optical characterization techniques, data analysis in Python or MATLAB, and translating lab measurements into PDK and circuit design updates.
• Strong technical leadership capability, excellent communication skills, and a demonstrated ability to collaborate across multidisciplinary teams (packaging, EIC, systems, and test).