Optical Engineer (Data Center) - Memphis

Location: Southaven, Mississippi or Memphis, Tennessee, United States. The role requires work in active data center and factory environments, travel to manufacturing and data center sites, and extended hours or weekends when needed for design releases, line bring-up, and cluster deployments.

Company

xAI develops AI systems designed to understand the universe and support humanity's pursuit of knowledge. The data center engineering organization builds training and inference compute infrastructure, including networking, racks, computers, and manufacturing systems.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end optical and fiber design for AI training and inference fabrics, including cabling, cassettes, panels, polarity, breakouts, reach, and connector strategy.
• Write and verify link budgets for InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects across single-mode and multimode fiber, AOC/DAC, and DR/FR/LR links.
• Develop factory tests for insertion loss, return loss, polarization, and optical interconnect production quality.
• Select and qualify transceivers, fiber, patching, trunks, cassettes, and harnesses while managing vendor bring-up, failure analysis, and fleet reliability.
• Deploy optical interconnects into the manufacturing line and lead commissioning and debugging using inspection and cleaning tools, power meters, OTDR, and BER/FEC statistics.
• Design high-density structured cabling and raceways with mechanical, network, rack, and facilities teams, while evolving connectivity toward 800G, 1.6T, and next-generation optical packaging.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, optical engineering, physics, or a related engineering discipline.
• At least 2 years of professional experience in fiber layout, optical link design, data center, HPC, or optical engineering.
• Working knowledge of single-mode and multimode fiber, MPO polarity, insertion and return loss, and 100G+ transceiver classes.
• Hands-on experience with fiber inspection and cleaning, power meters, OTDR, or equivalent optical testing equipment.
• Ability to work in active data center and factory environments, including live optical debug.
• Willingness to travel to manufacturing and data center sites and work extended hours or weekends when required.

Nice to have

• Optical design deployed in a data center, HPC, or AI-compute environment.
• Experience with GPU scale-out fabrics, InfiniBand NDR/XDR, or RoCE Ethernet at 400G/800G.
• High-density pre-terminated trunk and cassette design, rack-to-spine mapping, or optical harness and manufacturing-line design.
• Experience with optics vendor qualification, DWDM/DCI, CPO/NPO, linear-drive optics, or next-generation optical packaging.
• Experience at a high-velocity AI cloud, GPU cloud, or custom-compute hardware organization.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a small, highly motivated, hands-on engineering organization focused on technical excellence.
• Collaborate across mechanical, electrical, optical, software, network, rack, facilities, and manufacturing disciplines.
• Operate in a flat organizational structure where initiative and delivery support leadership opportunities.
• Contribute directly to the design and deployment of large-scale AI compute infrastructure.