---
title: 'Sr SDET– Firmware Automation at Lightmatter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-sdet-firmware-automation-lightmatter-boston-5amw6cysx86a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-25'
---

# Sr SDET– Firmware Automation at Lightmatter

- **Company:** Lightmatter
- **Location:** Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $178k–$225k
- **Posted:** 2026-09-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-25
- **Apply:** https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightmatter/jobs/5432530008?gh_jid=5432530008

## 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!

At Lightmatter, an SDET is a software engineer first , not a QA coordinator or manual tester. You'll design and build the frameworks, harnesses, and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure that let firmware engineers test their own code continuously on real photonic hardware. You'll sit with the firmware team, spend time at the bench with oscilloscopes, debuggers, and optical instruments, and serve as the bridge between firmware and broader software and systems organizations.

## Responsibilities

- Own the architecture and roadmap of the firmware test automation framework across products, targets, sites, and teams
- Design and build stable automation for new firmware features and hardware, held to production-quality engineering standards
- Build and operate HIL test infrastructure: bench and rack fixtures, device farms, power/reset control, instrument integration, and CI orchestration on real photonic hardware
- Define test strategy, plans, and reporting; lead test plan reviews across teams
- Integrate firmware testing into CI/CD so every change is built, flashed, exercised on hardware, and reported automatically
- Own framework reliability and flaky test metrics as first-class engineering problems
- Build results, telemetry, and log pipelines for triage, trend analysis, and release decisions
- Debug failures across the full stack (firmware, board, instrument, fixture, test code) and partner with engineers to resolve them
- Participate in firmware design reviews to influence testability and diagnostics early
- Integrate with data center management interfaces (CMIS, OpenBMC, DMTF); debug embedded systems using GDB, JTAG, and logic analyzers
- Define diagnostics and monitoring architecture for photonic transceivers
- Mentor engineers on test architecture and write clear documentation for non-specialists

## Qualifications

- 8+ years of professional software development, primarily on embedded products, including designing test frameworks and infrastructure
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience
- At least one automation framework or HIL system architected and built from scratch, adopted by other engineers, and in daily use  and the ability to discuss its design, tradeoffs, and lessons learned
- Strong Python: fixture and abstraction layers, hardware drivers, plugin/configuration architectures
- Working fluency in embedded C/C++: able to read firmware drivers or state machines and write tests for edge cases
- Experience owning CI/CD pipelines running tests on physical hardware (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent), including runner health, hardware allocation, and recovery
- Track record of delivering robust automation under fast-changing requirements and hardware

## Preferred Qualifications

- PhD, or MS with 8+ years in embedded test automation or firmware development
- Experience testing firmware for optical transceivers, photonic systems, or precision analog/mixed-signal hardware
- Familiarity with CMIS, OpenBMC, or DMTF/Redfish
- Experience with Pytest ecosystem and test tooling for Zephyr or FreeRTOS (Twister, ztest, Renode, QEMU, or similar)
- Experience with optical and electrical test and measurement equipment
- Startup experience
- Thoughtful use of AI-assisted tools in test generation, triage, or analytics

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. $178,000—$225,000 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

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- [Sr Staff Technical Program Manager, Hardware Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-staff-technical-program-manager-hardware-systems-lightmatter-boston-8s44wtw8vn1k) — Boston, MA
- [Senior Staff Electro-Optic Systems Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-electro-optic-systems-architect-lightmatter-boston-t9fcdxdhzwgn) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA / Toronto, Canada
- [Electro-Optic Systems Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/electro-optic-systems-architect-lightmatter-boston-3yanpf7qdk68) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
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