Photonics Design Engineer

Ayo is a venture-backed early-stage startup that will radically re-define how humanity performs compute for AI. Our photonic processors will provide orders of magnitude improvement in speed and power efficiency in comparison to conventional digital compute platforms by taking advantage of the natural parallelism, speed and energy efficiency of light.

We are seeking a photonics design engineer to serve as a core team member who will be among the first employees of the company. The engineer will expand Ayo’s component library in Ayo’s custom InP platform; design, analyze, and test photonic circuits and sub-circuits; and support the electronics / systems teams to design and bring-up prototypes. As a core member of the photonics team, they will participate in all phases of the design-tapeout-test-analyze cycle.

The ideal candidate has strong fundamentals in integrated optics, experience designing and laying out integrated optical devices or systems, and has a desire to explore the limits of what is possible in an exciting new integrated optics platform.

• Design/optimize integrated optical components
• Lay out photonic integrated circuits that test devices, demonstrate sub-system capabilities, and are full prototype chips
• Collect and analyze test data from test circuits
• Develop and maintain models of components, informed by underlying physics and measured data
• Provide expertise and support to other Ayo team members

• PhD in optics, electrical engineering, physics or related field with a focus on integrated photonics
• Experience designing, simulating, and testing integrated photonic devices
• Experience using commercial simulation tools (such as Ansys/Lumerical, Tidy3D, Rsoft or similar)
• Has taped out at least once
• Proficiency with Python

• Experience with script-based device/circuit layout
• Experience designing and laying out photonic integrated circuits
• Experience probing/testing photonic integrated circuits
• Experience designing lasers

• Mike Gould ()