Optical Engineer (Laser Systems)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 25, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 23, 2026. Furientis scores A on the Alion truth index.
About the Team
The Seeker Team builds the eyes and the targeting logic of our weapon system: a low-cost, mass-producible, multimodal missile seeker that leans on commercial supply chains where they outperform, and vertically integrates wherever possible. On a modern missile, the seeker is 40 to 60% of unit cost and often drives overly long delivery cycles; accordingly, the seeker team is at the tip of the spear for delivering capability to our customers and value to the taxpayer.
Seeker design has exactly two real constraints: physics and mission. Nothing else is a show-stopper, only an obstacle to overcome. We are a small, deeply technical team that drives capability through ingenuity and bias for action and ships hardware that flies. This is a wear-many-hats environment where you must be comfortable "building the airplane in flight" and stepping well outside your comfort zone; a narrowly scoped role with clean handoffs is not what this team offers.
This is an AI-native team. Through fluent use of cutting-edge agentic coding tools, one engineer here consistently out-delivers a much larger conventional team. You will have opinions about where these tools help and where they do not, provide governance input, and build out an AI-centric workflow from day one.
About the Role
You own the seeker's coherent channel from source to signal: laser illumination, coherent detection, and the active EO path that runs alongside the passive LWIR train. The architecture, the link budget, the receiver, and the bench demonstrations that become flight hardware are yours. You are also the laser transmitters' customer and integrator: you own what they must deliver, namely the transmitter specification, the channel-level proof that bought or built lasers close your link budget, and their integration into the channel. Designing and building the lasers themselves belongs to the Laser Engineer; judging them, specifying them, and making the channel perform with them belongs to you. Shared apertures and anything the passive train touches carry the opto-mechanical engineer's sign-off; the coherent channel's performance carries yours.
What You'll Do
Architect active EO channels: source, modulation, transmit path, receiver, and detection scheme.
Own the link budget end to end and defend it against measured data.
Write the channel side of the laser transmitter specification and ICD: pulse energy, pulse width, repetition rate, timing jitter, linewidth and coherence, divergence, and the seed format a seeded MOPA amplifier must preserve (seeds are bought off the shelf). The Laser Engineer designs to it; you defend it.
Laser source selection and qualification, near term, off-the-shelf transmitters from wherever expediency and cost win, plus modulators and detectors, and hold the technical vendor relationships for them.
Characterize transmitters as channel components and own their acceptance at channel level: measured energy, jitter, beam quality, and coherence over temperature and life, proving the link closes with real hardware rather than datasheets.
Design and build the coherent receiver: optical, electrical, and the signal chain to a usable measurement.
Integrate the transmitter into the channel: trigger and synchronization, the swap-ready source interface that lets a bought laser be replaced by our own without redesigning the channel, and, with the opto-mechanical engineer, shared apertures, boresight, and stray light.
Take the channel from bench demonstration to a packaging path that survives the flight environment.
Work lasers safely and legally in your own testing: classification inputs, NOHD analysis, and range safety for coherent-channel test events, under the Laser Safety Officer.
Deliver the coherent channel's measurements into the fusion and tracking stack with honest error models.
Skills We're Hiring For
B.S. in Optics, Photonics, Physics, or Electrical Engineering; M.S. or Ph.D. preferred.
5+ years of active EO work: ladar, interferometry, laser rangefinders, or free-space optical links.
Laser source fluency: linewidth, coherence, modulation, and the failure modes of each.
Specification, characterization, and integration of pulsed lasers (Q-switched Er:glass and seeded MOPA transmitters)
Design, alignment, and integration of beam steering devices, e.g., Risley prisms, FSMs, etc.
Photodetector fluency at 1.5 µm: PIN and balanced receivers, linear-mode APDs, and Geiger-mode SPADs (noise, bandwidth, and timing, and when each earns its place).
Fiber and free-space bench craft: alignment, isolation, and measurements you can trust, including laser-module qualification measurements (energy, fast-photodiode timing, beam profiling, spectrum).
Radiometry and link budget analysis from first principles.
Working laser-safety knowledge: ANSI Z136.1 classification, NOHD, and range use of Class 1M and above hardware.
Enough signal processing to carry the channel from photocurrent to measurement.
Proficient scripting for instrument control and data processing in Python or similar.
- Design-level Zemax; stray-light analysis with FRED, ASAP, or TracePro.
Bonus Points For
Eye-safe 1.5 µm transmitter integration: Er:glass rangefinder or designator modules taken from datasheet to qualified hardware.
Semi-active laser or designation experience.
Coherent detection theory and bench practice, heterodyne and homodyne.
Flight or munition-class optical hardware.
Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar) to multiply your output, with examples of what you've shipped.