Photonics Design Engineer - Early Stage Startup

Photonics Design Engineer - Early Stage StartupAyo 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.Responsibilities:Design/optimize integrated optical componentsLay out test circuits for optical componentsCollect and analyze test data from test circuitsDevelop and maintain models of components, informed by underlying physics and measured dataProvide expertise and support to other Ayo team membersQualifications:PhD in optics, electrical engineering, physics or related field with a focus on integrated photonicsExperience designing, simulating, and testing integrated photonic devicesExperience using commercial simulation tools (such as Ansys/Lumerical, Tidy3D, Rsoft or similar)Has taped out at least onceProficiency with PythonPreferred Qualifications:Experience with script-based device/circuit layoutExperience designing and laying out photonic integrated circuitsExperience probing/testing photonic integrated circuitsExperience designing lasersContact:Mike Gould (mike@)

Created: 2026-05-09