Principal Optical Design Engineer

Onsite 5 days a week – Chiswick, London.

We’re hiring a Principal Optical Design Engineer to own the optical architecture, design strategy, validation approach and production-intent development of Holo Mem’s optical system, taking it from initial validated prototypes towards scalable product architecture for our first generation Holo Drive product and subsequent roadmap.

At Holo Mem, we’re building the next generation of mass data storage hardware; highly efficient, long life, and ultra durable. Our pioneering and patented holographic technology encodes data as light within advanced polymers, enabling a resilient and future fit alternative to today’s short lived and energy intensive data storage infrastructure.

Over the past 24 months Holo Mem has graduated from both the Intel Ignite and Deeptech Labs accelerators, been awarded two Innovate UK Smart Grants, closed a seed+ funding round, and most recently deployed a working Holo Drive prototype to a live data centre to prove the robustness of our system.

Off the back of our breakthrough partnership with BDT, the world’s largest tape library manufacturer, we now begin the transition from prototype to product, maturing our validated system into a mass-produced technology platform that enables state of the art data storage performance  have ambitious plans, and we are now scaling up our West London based team to enable them. Join us.

You’ll work across the optical system that sits at the centre of Holo Mem’s first product. That means translating system-level requirements into practical optical architecture, modelling lens systems in Zemax, understanding tolerances, building confidence through lab validation, and making sure the design can move from prototype towards design verification, validation and production intent.

This is not a pure research role. We need someone who can work from first principles where required, but who has also seen what happens when optical designs meet mechanical packaging, assembly constraints, supplier capability, tolerance stack-ups and manufacturing reality. You’ll be expected to stay close to the work, not simply direct it from a distance.

This role is suited to a Principal Optical Design Engineer who has taken optical systems beyond prototype and understands what changes when a design has to become manufacturable, alignable, calibratable, testable, serviceable and repeatable.

You should be able to demonstrate the ability to:

• Own the optical architecture and design rationale for our first generation product and the roadmap beyond it
• Lead optical system design from early prototype through engineering verification, design validation and manufacturing line readiness
• Use Zemax to design, model and optimise lens systems for real hardware
• Define optical performance budgets, error budgets, tolerance budgets and calibration assumptions
• Own the optical trade-offs between lens spacing, alignment, encoding performance, packaging, thermal behaviour, manufacturability and cost
• Govern critical optical design decisions where performance, manufacturability, reliability, calibration, cost and scalability conflict
• Work hands‑on in the lab to correlate simulation with measured optical performance
• Communicate optical requirements clearly to mechanical, systems and product teams without losing the underlying physics
• Challenge optical designs where they create unnecessary complexity, unrealistic tolerances, fragile alignment requirements or poor manufacturability
• Work with suppliers to challenge component tolerances, manufacturability, lifecycle risk and cost‑performance trade‑offs

You are comfortable working at the boundary between optical physics, optical engineering and product development. You can reason deeply about lenses and systems, but you also understand that an optical design only becomes valuable when it can be assembled, aligned, calibrated, tested, supplied, serviced and scaled repeatably.

You are not looking for a role where you only review other people’s work. You still want to design, model, test, debug and improve the system yourself.

You should be able to act as…