---
title: 'Principal Product Manager, Photonics at Lightmatter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-product-manager-photonics-lightmatter-mountain-view-z3k6bf5y33fy'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Principal Product Manager, Photonics at Lightmatter

- **Company:** Lightmatter
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $226k–$317k
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightmatter/jobs/5436789008?gh_jid=5436789008

## Job description

Lightmatter is leading the revolution in AI data center infrastructure, enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company invented the world’s first 3D-stacked photonics engine, Passage™, capable of connecting thousands to millions of processors at the speed of light in extreme-scale data centers for the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.

Lightmatter raised $400 million in its Series D round, reaching a valuation of $4.4 billion. We will continue to accelerate the development of data center photonics and grow every department at Lightmatter!

If you're passionate about tackling complex challenges, making an impact, and being an expert in your craft, join our team of brilliant scientists, engineers, and accomplished industry leaders.

Lightmatter is (re)inventing the future of computing with light!

If you want to do your career’s most impactful work, consider joining the product team at Lightmatter! We are charting the path for the future of AI infrastructure. We are looking for an exceptional product leader with a track record of tackling challenging problems and driving results while prioritizing the team over their own interests.

As Principal Product Manager, Photonics, you will lead product definition, positioning, and execution for some of Lightmatter's most strategic products, including photonics computing. You will drive design wins with leading AI XPU companies, cloud providers, and AI infrastructure builders, positioning Lightmatter at the center of the next generation of AI compute and networking.

Reporting directly to the VP of Product Management, you will work closely with engineering, sales, solution architects, operations, finance, and the executive team to accelerate Lightmatter product adoption in this fast-growing market.

Responsibilities:

- Lead product definition, SKU strategy, and market positioning & messaging for Lightmatter's products, including full MRD/PRD ownership.
- Define and own the product roadmap for Lightmatter’s photonic computing platform, grounded in a deep understanding of ML workloads, model architecture, and hardware & software co-design trade-offs.
- Engage directly with AI/ML experts, cloud architects, and compute platform teams to validate product-market fit and shape the technical roadmap around real customer needs.
- Translate ML workload-level requirements into photonics computing product requirements in collaboration with engineering.
- Drive rollout to lead customers and manage full product lifecycle from early development through production and EOL.
- Develop pricing guidelines, margin analysis, and revenue forecasts establishing competitiveness and profitability in support of corporate financial goals.
- Represent Lightmatter at key industry forums and speaking events as a product leader and subject matter expert.
- Produce high-quality outbound technical and marketing collateral in conjunction with product marketing and documentation teams.
- Brief top industry press, analysts, and investors on Lightmatter product strategies, competitive advantages, and market positioning.

## Qualifications

- Strong, hands-on understanding of the AI/ML systems architecture — including ML model fundamentals, training and inference workload characteristics, XPU and accelerator architectures, and datacenter-scale system design.
- 15+ years of related industry experience with 10+ years in product management, product marketing, applications engineering, or business development roles driving high-complexity semiconductor or systems products to market.
- Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
- Proven ability to drive products through the full development cycle: business case → definition → development → design-in → production → EOL
- Experience with datacenter products and technologies, including compute infrastructure, optical networking, provisioning, and operations at scale..
- Strong end-to-end understanding of semiconductor chip development and the AI hardware ecosystem.
- Data-driven decision-maker with strong ability to synthesize technical and market data into product strategy.
- Effective cross-functional communicator who can bridge engineering depth and executive-level clarity.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Advanced degrees in optics/photonics or computer architecture.
- Deep technical knowledge of silicon photonics and/or optical interconnect technologies.
- Broad professional network across photonics, AI/ML, semiconductor, and cloud infrastructure segments.
- Self-starter with strong bias for action in a fast-paced, high-ambiguity environment — comfortable managing competing priorities and driving to results quickly.
- "No task too big or small" attitude with a genuine willingness to roll up sleeves wherever needed.

We offer competitive compensation. The base salary range for this role determined based on location, experience, educational background, and market data.

Salary Range: total compensation goes beyond base salary, it also includes a new hire equity grant, annual performance-based equity, and other rewards that recognize your impact and contribution. $226,000—$317,000 USD

## Benefits

- Comprehensive Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
- Retirement Savings Matching Program
- Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
- Generous Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
- Paid Family Leave
- Short Term & Long Term Disability
- Training & Development
- Commuter Benefits
- Flexible, hybrid workplace model
- Equity grants (applicable to full-time employees)

Benefits eligibility may vary depending on your employment status and location. Lightmatter recruits, employs, trains, compensates, and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law.

Export Control

Candidates should have capacity to comply with the federally mandated requirements of U.S. export control laws.

## About Lightmatter

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Lightmatter builds photonic interconnects and computing infrastructure to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks in AI and high-performance computing, enabling the next era of AI scaling.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, $850M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Nicholas Harris, PhD (CEO), Darius Bunandar, PhD (Head of Machine Learning), and a third co-founder (Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Silicon Photonics / AI Infrastructure / Semiconductor
- **Target customers**: Hyperscale data center operators, AI labs (training frontier models), cloud service providers, and enterprise AI teams
- **Mission or purpose**: To make computers keep getting better by using light instead of electricity for data movement, solving the fundamental bandwidth bottleneck that limits AI scaling.

## Products & Services
- **Passage™ Platform**: A family of 3D-stacked silicon photonics interconnects (NPO, OBO, 2D/3D CPO, 3D interposers) that provide "Edgeless I/O"—unlimited bandwidth scaling for AI supercomputers. Key variants include:
  - **Passage M1000 EVK**: Rack-level 3D photonic interposer delivering 114 Tbps across a 4,000 mm² footprint.
  - **Passage L200**: Designed for frontier-scale training, supporting 32–64 Tbps aggregate bandwidth via co-packaged optics (112G PAM4).
  - **Passage L20**: Accelerates optics integration with 12.8 Tbps aggregate bandwidth and 4x pluggable density.
  - **Passage EVK100**: High-bandwidth bidirectional link at 3.2 Tbps per fiber, 1.9 pJ/bit.
  - **Passage EVK50**: 16-wavelength bidirectional link at 800 Gbps per fiber, 2.6 pJ/bit.
- **Guide® Light Engines**: Very Large Scale Photonics technology—a universal light source (hundreds of lasers and photonics components on a single chip) designed to power co-packaged optics across the entire photonics industry.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $4.4 billion (as of October 2024)
- **Key Metric**: $850M total funding raised
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Tower Semiconductor (manufacturing partners); Amkor, ASE (packaging partners); NVIDIA (joined NVLink Fusion ecosystem); standards bodies including Ultra Ethernet, UALink, JEDEC, OIF, IEEE, OCP, and the Advanced Photonics Coalition.
- **Growth Signals**: First-mover in category-defining photonic interconnects; multiple generations of production-ready technology (not vaporware); reference platforms in customer hands; 100,000+ GPU cluster capability; world-first 16-wavelength bidirectional optical DWDM link on standard single-mode fiber (8x leap in bandwidth density); partnerships with top foundries ensure high-volume manufacturing.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Edgeless I/O architecture**: Eliminates the physical chip-perimeter constraint that limits electrical interconnects, enabling bandwidth to scale without bound.
- **Fundamentally better physics**: Photons travel without resistive loss, cross paths without interference, and carry multiple signals on a single fiber—far more efficient than electrons.
- **Deep vertical integration**: From photonic chip design to light engines (Guide) to complete interconnect platforms (Passage), with proprietary 3D stacking technology.
- **Decade-scale roadmap**: Continued bandwidth scaling (114 Tbps today, 1+ Pbps tomorrow) with production-ready silicon validated at scale.
- **Ecosystem lock-in**: Standards body leadership and partnerships with NVIDIA, TSMC, and hyperscalers create high switching costs.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale AI infrastructure**: Enable 100,000+ GPU clusters for trillion-parameter models, solving the interconnect bottleneck that currently strands hundreds of millions in compute capacity.
- **Productize photonics**: Move from reference platforms to volume production across Passage and Guide families, targeting both training and inference workloads.
- **Expand ecosystem**: Deepen partnerships with hyperscalers, AI labs, and chipmakers (e.g., NVIDIA NVLink Fusion) to make photonic interconnects the default for next-gen data centers.
- **Hire across all functions**: Actively growing engineering, research, sales, and operations teams to scale the company.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven impact**: Work at the intersection of photonics, AI, and semiconductor engineering to solve the most critical bottleneck in AI—data movement. Your work directly enables frontier models and trillion-parameter training.
- **World-class team**: Colleagues from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and UC Berkeley; published in Nature, Science, ISSCC, ISCA; 100+ patents; team members contributed to black hole simulation software for the Academy Award-winning movie *Interstellar*.
- **Cutting-edge technology**: Not research, not vaporware—multiple generations of production-ready photonic chips in customer hands, with a decade-scale roadmap.
- **Locations**: Mountain View, CA (HQ); Boston, MA; Hsinchu, Taiwan; Toronto, Canada.
- **Benefits**: 401(k), generous vacation policy and holidays, commuter benefits, happy hours, and a strong learning culture (peer-to-peer knowledge sharing across electronics, photonics, machine learning, and more).
- **Culture**: "We are one Lightmatter"—collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and focused on solving hard problems at scale.

## Sources
1. [lightmatter.co/about](https://lightmatter.co/about/)
2. [lightmatter.co](https://lightmatter.co/)
3. [lightmatter.co/people/careers](https://lightmatter.co/people/careers/)
4. [lightmatter.co/people](https://lightmatter.co/people/)
5. [linkedin.com/company/lightmatter](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightmatter)

## Other roles at Lightmatter

- [New Product Introduction (NPI) Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/new-product-introduction-npi-engineer-lightmatter-mountain-view-je7te558y220) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior Photonics Circuit Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-photonics-circuit-design-engineer-lightmatter-mountain-view-9w0g4dfzbxp2) — Mountain View, CA
- [Photonic Architect,  Temp](https://feeny.ai/job/photonic-architect-temp-lightmatter-toronto-6psysb195ped) — Toronto, Canada
- [Staff Photonics Design & PDK Modeling Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-photonics-design-pdk-modeling-engineer-lightmatter-boston-h60aef4xtyr4) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA / Toronto, Canada
- [Sr SDET– Firmware Automation](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-sdet-firmware-automation-lightmatter-toronto-9ap6p3s48g3p) — Toronto, Canada
- [Photonics Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/photonics-architect-lightmatter-boston-nfpcb2sf5mhp) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
- [Sr. Staff Product Manager (Photonics)](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-staff-product-manager-photonics-lightmatter-boston-ndfkcw7n0sew) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
- [Sr SDET– Firmware Automation](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-sdet-firmware-automation-lightmatter-boston-5amw6cysx86a) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
- [Electro-Optic Link Hardware Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electro-optic-link-hardware-engineer-lightmatter-mountain-view-cdm8nk3v6xa6) — Mountain View, CA
- [Staff/ Sr Staff Technical Program Manager, Hardware Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-sr-staff-technical-program-manager-hardware-systems-lightmatter-boston-8s44wtw8vn1k) — Boston, MA