Lasercom Engineer - All Levels

About EON

EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal.

EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City.

Today, approximately 95% of the global internet travels through a few hundred subsea fiber-optic cables, infrastructure designed in the early 2000s that has gone largely unchanged. Demand for new fiber has never been higher, but laying it is extraordinarily difficult: permits, ocean geology, and geopolitical boundaries make every new cable a years-long, billion-dollar undertaking. That bottleneck is a liability with cables at constant risk of being cut, whether by accident or adversarial action, and no amount of ground-based investment can fully solve it.

EON is currently hiring our founding laser communications (Lasercom) team and seeking engineers who want to build the network infrastructure of the modern world and grow a real business from the ground up. Engineers at EON work across the full breadth of optical systems, from free-space link design to ground terminal hardware, solving problems that are real, hands-on, and consequential.

EON is building Tbps-class optical links to MEO, and every piece of the optical chain needs an owner, from the physics through hardware in space. If you run deep in a specific concentration (coherent communications, amplification and beam control, optical design, optomechanics, pointing, or test and integration) we'll put you on the part of the system where your depth matters most, and your work will directly gate first light on our single-route demonstrator and enable the full constellation.

If you're a strong generalist who can move across the chain, you'll help integrate it end to end and grow into the seat that fits you best. Either way, you join the first wave of the optical team, work directly with engineers across the lasercom team, and own hardware that ships.

Below are some of the concentrations we're building in. Don't worry about being a perfect match, and if your experience leans toward one of these, or spans several, tell us and we'll find the right seat together.

A note on level and background: We hire this role at all levels, from Associate through Senior and Principal Lasercom Engineer, and calibrate title, scope, and compensation to your experience. If this list doesn't perfectly match your background still reach out. We are always looking for exceptional people from many disciplines.

• Own a distinct link in the optical chain and carry it from concept through first light

• Design and model your subsystem against system-level targets

• Build, characterize, and debug hardware at the bench, standing up test setups and validating performance against your own analysis

• Define interfaces and integration constraints with engineers across the lasercom chain, driving co-design trade-offs where optical, electrical, and mechanical performance are tightly coupled

• Identify the highest-risk assumptions in your subsystem early and retire them through analysis, prototyping, and test

• Set and defend technical direction with incomplete data, documenting your reasoning so the team can build on it

1. System Architecture
You own the link end to end: link budget, FEC strategy, OSNR and availability targets, and how the optical, atmospheric, and orbital pieces fit together. You set the targets that the team will design against. You may excel here if you've owned a full lasercom link budget end to end and can defend every assumption in it.

2. Coherent Communications
You work in coherent transceivers, DSP, and forward error correction. You've designed modems, written or tuned soft-decision LDPC, equalization, and modulation, and you can reason about a link budget from the waveform up. You may excel here if you've designed modems or coherent DSP and reason natively in OSNR, symbol rates,…