Photonics Design Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 27, 2026. First seen by Alion on May 5, 2026. Ayo Semiconductor scores B on the Alion truth index.
Ayo is a venture-backed early-stage startup that will radically re-define how humanity performs compute for AI. Our photonic processors will provide orders of magnitude improvement in speed and power efficiency in comparison to conventional digital compute platforms by taking advantage of the natural parallelism, speed and energy efficiency of light.
We are seeking a photonics design engineer to serve as a core team member who will be among the first employees of the company. The engineer will expand Ayo’s component library in Ayo’s custom InP platform; design, analyze, and test photonic circuits and sub-circuits; and support the electronics / systems teams to design and bring-up prototypes. As a core member of the photonics team, they will participate in all phases of the design-tapeout-test-analyze cycle. The ideal candidate has strong fundamentals in integrated optics, experience designing and laying out integrated optical devices or systems, and has a desire to explore the limits of what is possible in an exciting new integrated optics platform.
Responsibilities:
Design/optimize integrated optical components
Lay out photonic integrated circuits that test devices, demonstrate sub-system capabilities, and are full prototype chips
Collect and analyze test data from test circuits
Develop and maintain models of components, informed by underlying physics and measured data
Provide expertise and support to other Ayo team members
Qualifications:
PhD in optics, electrical engineering, physics or related field with a focus on integrated photonics
Experience designing, simulating, and testing integrated photonic devices
Experience using commercial simulation tools (such as Ansys/Lumerical, Tidy3D, Rsoft or similar)
Has taped out at least once
Proficiency with Python
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with script-based device/circuit layout
Experience designing and laying out photonic integrated circuits
Experience probing/testing photonic integrated circuits
Experience designing lasers
Contact:
Mike Gould ([email protected])