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Neurophos is developing silicon photonics technology for AI compute, using programmable metasurfaces to perform matrix multiplications at the speed of light. The company recently raised $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier and has assembled a world-class team of industry veterans.
You will serve as Chief Engineer owning the technical execution of the company's first fully integrated prototype system. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role spanning optical sources, electro-optic modulation, high-speed mixed-signal electronics, free-space optics, programmable photonic compute elements, and firmware/host software. You will be the single technical authority ensuring all subsystems—developed by internal teams and external design partners—integrate coherently across optical, electrical, mechanical, and data interfaces.
Key responsibilities include: owning the end-to-end system performance budget and architecture; maintaining interface definitions that all subsystems are built against; reviewing designs from internal teams and vendors; scrutinizing component choices and challenging assumptions; driving laboratory integration and bring-up; correlating measured performance against predicted budgets; and designing controlled experiments to isolate and quantify optical and electrical impairments. Beyond initial demonstration, you will steward the prototype as a permanent experimental platform for the company, keeping it instrumented, reconfigurable, and trustworthy as a measurement reference. You will design and run experimental campaigns that answer architecture questions for the next product generation, ensuring laboratory insights feed directly into system models and design decisions.
This role demands deep multi-disciplinary hardware intuition, systems-engineering discipline, technical credibility with both internal teams and external suppliers, and experimental rigor. You will read schematics, question component choices, recompute budgets, trace anomalies from measured waveforms back to architectural decisions, and turn a laboratory system into a durable source of physical insight.
Secondary responsibilities include maintaining system requirements, verification matrices, and configuration-controlled documentation; owning the technical risk register; interfacing with analog IC, digital design, photonic device, optics, and packaging teams; partnering with system modeling and calibration teams; building automated measurement and analysis infrastructure; contributing to build planning and procurement; and mentoring engineers across disciplines.
REQUIREMENTS:
- BS required; MS or PhD strongly preferred in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Applied Physics, or closely related field
- 15+ years of professional experience developing complex multi-disciplinary hardware systems
- At least 3 years as responsible system-level engineer or technical lead
- Demonstrated ownership of at least one system from architecture definition through design, integration, laboratory bring-up, and experimental characterization
- Proven ability to construct and maintain requirements sets, interface control documents, verification matrices, and quantitative performance budgets (link, noise, error, timing, power)
- Demonstrated ability to design experiments isolating single physical mechanisms within complex systems
- Comfort with measurement uncertainty, repeatability, confounding variables, and experimental discipline
- Familiarity with statistical design of experiments and sensitivity analysis
- Strong working knowledge of analog and high-speed electronics (data converters, transmission lines, termination, amplifiers, detectors, noise, power integrity, grounding)
- Ability to independently review schematics and identify design errors
- Deep understanding of optical and mixed-signal impairment mechanisms (thermal, shot, flicker noise; mismatch; distortion; bandwidth; crosstalk; quantization; jitter; drift)
- Solid understanding of optical system fundamentals (sources, propagation, modulation, photodetection, power budgets, alignment tolerances)
- Working fluency in linear algebra, signal processing, modulation and encoding theory
- Experience as technical authority over external design houses, contract manufacturers, vendors
- Sufficient understanding of embedded firmware, FPGA control, and host software architecture to specify and review interfaces
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or MATLAB for budgeting, automation, analysis, and modeling
- Excellent technical communication and documentation skills
PREFERRED:
- Experience owning a laboratory testbed or experimental platform for multiple years used by several teams
- Experience with high-channel-count systems requiring matching, alignment, calibration
- Familiarity with FPGA/RFSoC platforms and associated board-level design practices
- Experience with fiber-optic assemblies, connectorization, optical alignment, opto-mechanical tolerancing
- Background in optical transceivers, coherent/direct-detection links, silicon photonics, photonic computing
- Experience with modulation formats, coding, precision-noise trade-offs in analog/optical computing
- Familiarity with calibration architectures
- Experience with Monte Carlo analysis, error budgeting, behavioral system models
- Experience running formal gate review processes (PDR/CDR-style)
- Familiarity with Cadence Virtuoso, Spectre, or comparable circuit simulation
- Laboratory proficiency with oscilloscopes, network/spectrum analyzers, optical power meters, alignment equipment
- Experience with configuration-controlled documentation and version-controlled issue tracking
