Principal Electro-Optical​/Adaptive Optics Engineer, Fusion Systems

Principal Electro-Optical/Adaptive Optics Engineer, Fusion Systems

Denver, CO

Engineering – Optical Engineering

Full-Time / On-site

Xcimer Energy leverages decades of research on Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) combined with groundbreaking new laser architecture. Our mission is to deploy fusion power plants to meet global decarbonization goals as fast as possible. Xcimer has assembled a team of leaders in tough tech, fusion science, and manufacturing with a track record of rapid execution. Supported by leading investors, Xcimer is uniquely positioned to deliver limitless, clean, fusion power to combat climate change.

Join us in powering a better world with inertial fusion!

This is a full-time, onsite role based at our headquarters in Denver, CO. Xcimer is seeking a Principal Electro-Optical/Adaptive Optics Engineer to serve as the technical authority for adaptive optics within the organization, leading the design, specification, procurement, and integration of a high-speed custom adaptive optics system for our fusion beamlines. You will own the architecture: system-level requirements, performance budgets, and the bandwidth, stroke, and latency trades that determine whether closed-loop correction is good enough to put energy on target.

You will also own the vendor relationships that supply the system and the commissioning that proves it works. The physics of what reaches the target decides what the adaptive optics system has to do, so this role is built around the performance model as much as the hardware. You will predict far-field irradiance and focal-spot quality through the beamline, decompose the error budget into fitting, temporal, measurement, calibration, and non-common-path terms, and use that to set the requirements on deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, and the real-time loop.

You do not need to be at the bench yourself. You do need to be able to define the proof-of-concept and de-risking experiments and direct optical engineers, laser scientists, and technicians to execute them.

This is also a group-building role. Xcimer’s adaptive optics capability is small and growing, and you will help shape what it becomes: the technical standards and development practices it works to, the hiring bar, the engineers you mentor, and technology development that outlives any single program. We move on real hardware quickly. We want the governing equations and a first-order layout before money is committed, and we want a cheap experiment that could break the concept shortly after.

We are looking for our scientists and engineers to apply their technical expertise, problem solving skills, and dedication to quality to positively impact the future of energy!

• Serve as technical lead for the adaptive optics system, from requirements definition through integration and commissioning. Own adaptive optics and wavefront control requirements for the fusion beamlines, from top-level beam quality and energy-on-target objectives down to component and interface specifications. Build and maintain the end-to-end performance model: wave-optics propagation through the beamline, prediction of far-field irradiance and focal-spot quality at target, and a wavefront error budget resolved into fitting, temporal, measurement, calibration, and non-common-path terms.
  
  Own the disturbance model that drives it: beam path turbulence and gas density fluctuations, thermally induced aberration in amplifiers and transport optics, static figure error, opto-mechanical jitter, and pulse-to-pulse repeatability at operational repetition rate. Set the resulting requirements on deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, reconstructors, and the real-time control loop, including actuator count and stroke, bandwidth, latency,…