Photonics Software Engineer; Senior or Mid-level

EMode develops simulation software for integrated photonics. The company was founded in Boulder in 2021 around an eigenmode solver with a Python scripting interface. Since then the product has grown into a three-dimensional eigenmode expansion package that research groups and companies use to design wave guides, resonators, couplers, arrayed waveguide gratings, and nonlinear and quantum photonic devices.

Our current development is aimed closing the gap between a photonic device simulation/design and the device experimental performance after fabrication. We want designers to optimize against the performance they will actually receive, including realistic geometry, scattering loss, thermal and electrical effects, and nonlinear response, from a single component up through a full circuit. Doing this at practical speed requires methods that are orders of magnitude more efficient than the conventional ones, so that a designer can sweep parameters, run optimizations, and carry fabrication tolerances through the analysis.

We are a small team, growing to meet demand from academia, industry, and enterprise photonics development. The people who join in this round will have a direct hand in how the company and the product develop.

• You will have close feedback from users, helping guide our product development to create real value and impact in our customers' workflows.
• Releases go out every few weeks, so your work is quickly in users' hands.
• We work on site in Boulder, Colorado. The team is collaborative with decisions about the roadmap, the architecture, and hiring.
• Much of the work begins with new derivations: nonlinear electromagnetics, mode theory, semiconductor device physics, and numerical linear algebra. We support publishing results when appropriate.
• Every position includes stock options, sized to reflect joining at an early stage.
• As an early employee you will have more responsibility than the same title would carry at a larger company, and you will help establish the practices of our growing team.

You will develop the numerical core of EMode together with our lead software engineer. The work is to take electromagnetic and nonlinear-optical formulations and turn them into robust software that customers run every day: deriving and checking the physics, optimizing the linear algebra, and making the implementation fast, well-tested, and maintainable within a shared codebase.

We are posting this position at two levels, and the level of the hire will depend on the candidates we meet. The responsibilities are the same at both levels. The difference is how much of the work you take on independently from the start, and how closely you work with the lead software engineer and the founder while you learn the codebase.

• Implement and extend eigenmode expansion, mode solving, and nonlinear propagation methods
• Derive new numerical methods and validate them against analytical limits, published measurements, and existing methods
• Improve the solver performance through profiling, vectorization, sparse and dense linear algebra, and attention to convergence
• Design new physics features from the backend to the user-facing API
• Extend the validation suite with regression tests, analytical benchmarks, and convergence studies
• Reproduce and diagnose modeling discrepancies reported by users, and correct them
• Write documentation, examples, and tutorial models for the features you ship

• Multiple physics features you derived, implemented, and validated are in a public release
• The validation suite that you updated catches regressions before users do
• You have taken a modeling insufficiency from a user’s first report through to a fix or a documented workaround
• At the senior level, the team is following new implementation patterns you established

Senior Photonics Software Engineer. You have developed photonics or computational electromagnetics software as part of a team, and you can carry a feature from derivation to release with little supervision. You will own large parts of the solver, review code, establish implementation patterns for others, and take on the more involved modeling questions that come in from users.
Base salary: $150,000 – $190,000

Photonics Software Engineer. You have the physics background and you can program, but you have not yet done much production software work, or you have software experience and your optics comes mainly from coursework and…