Chief Engineer (AI Photonics)

Location: On-site in Austin, Texas, United States

Salary: $265,000–$310,000 per year, plus equity

Company

hirify.global is an early-stage company developing silicon-photonic and programmable-metasurface computing architectures for energy-efficient large-scale AI inference.

What you will do

• Own the technical execution of the first fully integrated optical computing prototype and its end-to-end performance budget.
• Define system architecture, requirements, interface-control documentation, verification matrices, and quantitative performance allocations across optical, electrical, mechanical, thermal, and data interfaces.
• Review designs and deliverables from internal teams, external design partners, and component suppliers, including schematics, layouts, bills of materials, optical systems, and mixed-signal electronics.
• Lead system integration, laboratory bring-up, validation, debugging, and correlation of measured results with predicted performance models.
• Design experiments to characterize noise, mismatch, nonlinearity, crosstalk, dispersion, drift, quantization, and timing errors affecting computational accuracy.
• Steward the prototype as a long-lived, calibrated, reconfigurable experimental platform and use its results to guide future optical-computing architectures.

Requirements

• BS in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related field; MS or PhD strongly preferred.
• 15+ years of experience developing complex multidisciplinary hardware systems, including at least 3 years as a system-level engineer or technical lead.
• Experience taking a system from architecture definition through design, integration, laboratory bring-up, and experimental characterization.
• Strong knowledge of analog and high-speed electronics, optical systems, mixed-signal impairments, signal processing, modulation, and encoding theory.
• Ability to review firmware, FPGA, and host-software interfaces without necessarily writing production firmware.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or MATLAB, plus excellent technical communication, documentation, supplier oversight, and architectural decision-making skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with silicon photonics, optical transceivers, photonic computing, fiber-optic assemblies, or opto-mechanical systems.
• Experience with high-channel-count systems, FPGA or RFSoC platforms, calibration architectures, Monte Carlo analysis, and error budgeting.
• Familiarity with Cadence Virtuoso, Spectre, automated laboratory instrumentation, and formal PDR/CDR-style gate reviews.
• Experience owning a laboratory testbed used by multiple teams over several years.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on an AI hardware platform combining photonics, optical computing, and high-efficiency inference.
• Health plan premiums are fully covered for employees and dependents, with HSA contributions.
• Unlimited PTO and a range of voluntary dental, vision, life, hospital, critical-illness, and accident insurance benefits.
• 401(k) matching, stock option opportunities, and customizable benefits plans.