---
title: 'Staff Operations Program Manager at Lightmatter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-operations-program-manager-lightmatter-mountain-view-r59wfbehcxwn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Staff Operations Program Manager at Lightmatter

- **Company:** Lightmatter
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $149k–$220k
- **Posted:** 2026-11-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightmatter/jobs/5464327008?gh_jid=5464327008

## 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!

Lightmatter's Supply Chain Operations team designs and executes the complex, global manufacturing networks required to build our world-first photonic engines at scale. We partner seamlessly with critical component vendors and Tier-1 manufacturing partners to deliver a resilient, cost-effective, and rapid flow of cutting-edge hardware.

As an Operations Program Manager, you will serve as the primary operational program owner driving supplier execution, Statement of Work governance, and master build planning across silicon foundries, Tier-1/Tier-2 OSATs, and Contract Manufacturers. Operating with high autonomy, you will bridge internal R&D, Packaging Engineering, Quality, and Commercial teams with external vendor leadership to drive NPI builds through to High-Volume Manufacturing.

In this role, you will immediately take operational ownership of active Passage and/or Guide programs. You will maintain complete control over multi-tier material availability tracking, Clear-To-Build readiness, vendor milestone enforcement, and cross-functional schedule alignment.

Core Responsibilities

- Serve as the senior operational leader owning the complete material development lifecycle from NPI through HVM. You will act as the primary operations counterpart to engineering and quality teams, collaborating directly with external vendors to ensure all hardware materials are realized and available to support the master schedule.
- Drive end-to-end operational execution for assigned electro-optical program lines by aligning customer and internal demand into master build plans spanning silicon foundries, OSATs, and Contract Manufacturers.
- Build and maintain virtual line-item Clear-To-Build (CTB) matrices across multi-tier suppliers. You will track component lead times and drive consigned material staging into OSAT and CM facilities to guarantee unblocked build execution.
- Partner with engineering leads to draft, enforce, and track vendor Statements of Work. You will conduct weekly operational progress reviews, hold suppliers accountable to milestone deliverables, and drive overall vendor execution metrics.
- Actively track and resolve critical-path dependencies that impact external manufacturing, driving internal teams to provide the design freeze sign-offs, ECO cut-ins, and test scripts required by vendor partners to proceed with production.
- Maintain transparent milestone risk logs, material readiness trackers, and build progress dashboards to consistently communicate program status and critical path risks to executive leadership with actionable mitigation plans.
- Own PLM workflows across the product lifecycle, which includes creating and managing Bills of Materials and directly managing the routing and approval of Engineering Change Orders.

Required Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain, Business Management, Engineering, or a related field, complemented by relevant operational experience.
- 8+ years of progressive experience in Operations Program Management or Partner Operations within high-tech hardware, semiconductors, optical networking, or silicon photonics.
- Proven track record directly managing external manufacturing partners, contract manufacturers, silicon foundries, or OSATs through complex NPI-to-HVM build cycles.
- Advanced expertise constructing multi-tier master schedules, tracking material availability, and enforcing line-item CTB matrices across multi-stage assembly flows.
- Executive presence, influence, and assertiveness necessary to drive both internal engineering teams and external partner program managers to strict milestone dates.
- Hands-on experience executing BOM management, ECO routing, and revision control within PLM systems, alongside working within ERP/MRP environments.

## Preferred Qualifications

- A Master’s degree in Supply Chain Management, Industrial Engineering, or a technical discipline is strongly preferred.
- Highly value direct experience managing operational supplier partnerships specifically in electro-optical packaging, silicon photonics, high-speed optical transceivers, or AI compute hardware.
- Desire a deep understanding of multi-tier semiconductor transitions, from wafer sort through advanced packaging to final module assembly.
- Hands-on experience executing BOM management, ECO routing, and revision control within PLM software (e.g., Arena, Agile, Teamcenter, or similar).

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. $149,000—$220,000 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 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 Electrical Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-electrical-design-engineer-lightmatter-mountain-view-sfy1mk5tzwsr) — 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