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Salary: USD 130,000 - 200,000 / annual
K2 Space is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, backed by over $1 billion in funding from leading investors and with over $1 billion in signed contracts across commercial and US government customers. The company is mass-producing high-power satellite platforms for missions from LEO to deep space, with multiple launches planned for 2027 and scaling to 100 satellites per year.
As a Photonic IC Design Engineer focused on chip-to-system integration, you will design photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and their packages for space deployment. You will own the boundary between chip and system on both optical and electrical sides: designing how light couples on and off the chip, managing fiber attachment and alignment, implementing high-speed modulators and RF interfaces, and ensuring the entire assembly survives launch and years in orbit. Your coupling-loss, modulator, and bandwidth specifications feed directly into system link budgets, requiring close collaboration with systems, photonics test, RF, ASIC, and manufacturing teams, as well as external foundry and packaging partners. As a founding member of the photonics team, you will help establish how K2 designs, packages, and qualifies photonic hardware at constellation scale.
Key responsibilities include: designing, simulating, and laying out PIC devices (couplers, spot-size converters, photodetectors, passive components) through tapeout on commercial foundry platforms; designing high-speed modulators with electrodes, terminations, and RF launches, co-designed with RF and ASIC engineers; implementing bias and tuning control in hardware with closed-loop verification over temperature and radiation; setting optical I/O requirements and integrating them into chip floorplans and system link budgets; designing mechanical package components in 3D CAD (carriers, submounts, fiber-array geometry, alignment fixtures) with tolerance stack-ups tied to coupling-loss budgets; driving radiation, thermal-vacuum, and vibration qualification campaigns and translating results into design rules; partnering on characterization with test and automation teams to define test plans, design test structures, and validate automated measurements; and carrying high-speed electrical paths through the package with presentations at design reviews.
REQUIREMENTS:
- PhD or MS in electrical engineering, optics, physics, or related field, or Bachelor's degree with equivalent experience
- PIC designs taken through tapeout on one or more commercial integrated photonics platforms (silicon photonics, silicon nitride, indium phosphide, thin-film lithium niobate) with fabricated devices characterized in the lab
- Hands-on work at the chip boundary: optical I/O design with fiber attach or packaging, or high-speed modulator and RF design measured with a VNA (S-parameters, electro-optic bandwidth)
- Photonic device simulation (Meep, Tidy3D, Lumerical FDTD, FEM, or EME), layout tools (KLayout, gdsfactory, Cadence), and Python for automation and data analysis
NICE TO HAVE:
- 3D mechanical CAD (SolidWorks, Inventor, Fusion) for package parts or fixtures
- Radiation, thermal-vacuum, or vibration testing of photonic or electronic devices
- Inverse design or topology optimization of couplers and optical I/O devices
- RF package or board design to tens of GHz (HFSS, Sonnet)
- Heterogeneous or 3D integration and co-packaged optics
- Hardware built for space or other harsh environments
- Modulator bias control, resonator locking, or closed-loop control of photonic devices
- Background in RF or microwave engineering
Note: ITAR compliance required; must be a U.S. Person as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.15 or eligible for federally issued export control license.
