---
title: 'Staff Electrical Design Engineer at Lightmatter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-electrical-design-engineer-lightmatter-mountain-view-sfy1mk5tzwsr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Staff Electrical Design Engineer at Lightmatter

- **Company:** Lightmatter
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $186k–$250k
- **Posted:** 2026-10-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightmatter/jobs/5448319008?gh_jid=5448319008

## 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!

Staff Electrical Design Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Electrical Design Engineer to contribute to the development of the next generation of silicon photonics based artificial intelligence accelerators and interconnect products.

In this role, you will lead board and system solutions that leverage Lightmatter’s technology to enable advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large-scale interconnect platforms.

You will lead and own Hardware systems efforts, collaborate closely with teams across hardware and software, including mechanical, packaging, and IC engineering, to design, integrate, troubleshoot and release system-level products at the leading edge of innovation.

## Responsibilities

- Collaborate with the system architect and technical leads to define system-level hardware requirements and spec.
- Electrical design of power, memory, and interconnect circuits, working in both the analog and digital domains.
- Identify electrical and optical components to fit the application based on specifications provided by the IC and photonics engineering teams.
- Starting from fundamental concepts and system considerations you will develop conceptual designs, physical modeling, and simulations of chip-modules and systems.
- Oversee and review PCB layout designs, providing complete and detailed electrical constraint rules.
- Ensure the board and system is manufacturable to the latest technologies with high yield and robustness.
- Qualification of chip and system electrical properties.
- Perform laboratory validation of boards and systems.
- Lead integration with mechanical, software, IC, and other related teams.
- Support contract manufacturing during prototype and production phase to resolve any issues.
- Work with component vendors and other supply partners.
- Research new components, processes, and technologies to meet product goals.

## Qualifications

- Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering.
- 8+ years of related experience in system-level electrical design, having successfully taken several products from concept to production.
- Proficient in schematic design using Cadence, Mentor, or Altium tool set (Altium preferred).
- In depth knowledge on VRMs, high speed SERDES, CPUs and various interfaces/protocols such as PCIe, Ethernet, QSPI, I3C, I2C, etc.
- 5+ years of experience in lab experimentation, non-intrusive circuit debugging, and leading cross-functional integration teams.
- Experience in working with thermal solutions for integrated circuits and their board level systems.
- Familiar with Product Lifecycle Management tools, e.g. Oracle Agile, Arena, or Omnify PLM with an understanding of BOM and ECO management.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience designing electrical systems for networking or similar industries.
- Knowledge of integrated circuit layout, and designing a carrier PCBA for it.
- Knowledge of common manufacturing and design processes.
- Familiarity with Systems Engineering principles.
- Familiar with 3D Mechanical CAD tools, e.g. Solidworks or AutoCAD.

This role is open to two levels Staff and Sr Staff. Leveling placement and salary range is dependent on education, years of experience, and interview performance. 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. $186,000—$250,000 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

- [Photonics Characterization Intern- Winter 2026](https://feeny.ai/job/photonics-characterization-intern-winter-2026-lightmatter-boston-9fvp463kw7w5) — Boston, MA
- [People Operations Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-analyst-lightmatter-boston-xjbzft5ss1nq) — Boston, MA
- [Staff Operations Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-operations-program-manager-lightmatter-mountain-view-r59wfbehcxwn) — Mountain View, CA
- [Staff Global Supply Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-global-supply-manager-lightmatter-mountain-view-hk2wt4w7m7d7) — Mountain View, CA
- [Hardware Systems Technical Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-systems-technical-lead-lightmatter-mountain-view-nz8165k14n8h) — Mountain View, CA
- [Electro-Optic Link Hardware Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electro-optic-link-hardware-engineer-lightmatter-boston-a6gv9g4462rb) — Boston, MA / Mountain View, CA
- [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
- [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