---
title: 'Staff/Sr Staff Technical Program Manager, Hardware Systems at Lightmatter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-sr-staff-technical-program-manager-hardware-systems-lightmatter-mountain-4h83q6qsweq2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Staff/Sr Staff Technical Program Manager, Hardware Systems at Lightmatter

- **Company:** Lightmatter
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $189k–$252k
- **Posted:** 2026-08-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightmatter/jobs/5377132008?gh_jid=5377132008

## 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!

We are hiring a Sr Technical Program Manager (TPM) to drive program execution across Lightmatter's Hardware Systems team. You will drive schedules, resource planning, priorities, and cross-functional alignment for all projects and activities within the team - spanning electrical, mechanical, and system engineering.. You will work closely with internal teams such as SI, PI, SW, supply chain, and with external partners, including contract manufacturers, PCB and sheet metal fabricators, assembly houses, and other suppliers, to keep programs on track from early design through production.

In this role, you will manage dependencies and trade-offs across concurrent workstreams, facilitate alignment across internal and external stakeholders, and maintain program visibility for engineering leadership. Your scope covers the full hardware development lifecycle, from design through production, including the engineering support programs, test infrastructure, and tooling that keep the broader team moving. You will also serve as the team's primary program interface to broader organizational programs, ensuring that schedule changes, material commitments, and engineering status are communicated accurately and on time to cross-functional program stakeholders.

This is a hands-on role that combines strong program management fundamentals with a working knowledge of hardware engineering. You will be equally at home in a design review, a supplier call, a resource planning discussion, and an executive status update. You will also need to thrive in a fast-moving environment where requirements evolve, priorities shift, and not every process is fully established, and bring the clarity and structure that turns that ambiguity into forward progress.

## Responsibilities

- Own program coordination across all HW Systems activities: maintain an integrated schedule across all concurrent projects and workstreams, surface priority conflicts, and drive resolution of resource contention with engineering leads.
- Drive cross-functional alignment between HW Systems and other teams: setting agendas, facilitating meetings, capturing decisions, communicating delays and risks, and relentlessly following up on action items
- Manage team-wide resource loading and capacity visibility, partnering with engineering leads to flag overallocation risks and drive trade-offs discussions across concurrent programs
- Build and maintain integrated program schedules that reflect hardware development realities - bring-up milestones, NPI phases, EVT/DVT/PVT gates, and cross-team dependencies
- Own program scope that lives outside formal project charters: tester boards, demos, lab fixtures, calibration equipment, and internal engineering tools that teams depend on but that would otherwise lack dedicated ownership
- Coordinate material flow within the HW Systems team: track component orders, PCB fab runs, PCBA and mechanical assemblies, and engineering samples; partner with supply chain to ensure critical materials land on schedule
- Track and coordinate cross-functional teams' HW deliverable dependencies including quantities and timelines, and ensure downstream teams are unblocked with accurate, up-to-date visibility into HW schedule and status
- Serve as the primary hardware program interface with external contract manufacturers, PCB and sheet metal fabricators, and assembly houses: managing schedules, tracking deliverables, facilitating technical alignment, and driving closure on open issues in partnership with Supply chain.
- Represent the HW Systems team in company-wide program reviews and cross-functional planning cadences; own the team's program interface to broader organizational stakeholders, communicating schedule changes, material needs, and engineering commitments proactively and clearly
- Track HW Systems budgets for engineering activities, prototype builds, and tooling; coordinate with finance and operations to ensure spend is planned, visible, and aligned with program milestones
- Adapt quickly to change: replan and realign when scope shifts, schedules move, or engineering realities force a pivot; maintain momentum and clarity even when the path forward is not fully defined
- Establish and maintain lightweight program management processes: status reporting cadences, risk registers, dependency tracking, and decision logs

## Qualifications

- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of program management experience in hardware engineering, with direct exposure to electrical and mechanical development cycles.
- Proven track record managing concurrent engineering programs with shared resources and overlapping timelines.
- Deep familiarity with hardware development processes and terminology across the full lifecycle—including PCBA and mechanical enclosures, PCB fabrication, system integration, bring-up, EVT/DVT/PVT, and production—enabling clear communication with engineers and vendors.
- Proven experience coordinating with contract manufacturers (CMs) and ODMs to manage schedules, track deliverables, and resolve open issues.
- Hands-on experience with material flow, component tracking, and BOM management.
- Skilled facilitator who drives productive meetings, captures critical context, and ensures action items are owned and closed.
- Strong written and verbal communicator, comfortable presenting program status and risk assessments to engineering leads and executives.
- Expert in project management tools such as Microsoft Project, Jira, Smartsheet, or equivalent platforms.
- Strong bias for action—consistently closes loops, follows up independently, and identifies potential slips before they impact project timelines.
- Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; proactively creates structure and drives clarity without waiting for complete information.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience managing programs for complex hardware development
- Experience defining and improving program management processes in a startup or new business unit

This role is open to two different levels.

Staff: $189,000 - $210,000

Sr Staff: $217,000 - $252,000 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. $189,000—$252,000 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)

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