Photonic IC Design Engineer, Design Automation & Modeling (AI)

Location: Seattle, WA. The hired person must be a U.S. person as defined by ITAR or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export control license.

Base salary: $130,000–$200,000 per year plus equity.

Company

hirify.global develops and operates high-power satellite platforms and photonic payloads for commercial and U.S. government missions from LEO to deep space.

What you will do

• Own the photonic design automation flow, including parametric layout generation, simulation orchestration, design-space exploration, and automated DRC/LVS sign-off across silicon, silicon nitride, and III-V foundry platforms.
• Build fabrication-aware inverse-design engines with topology optimization, lithography models, and robustness to process variation.
• Integrate agentic and AI-guided tools for layout generation, optimization, design-space exploration, and data analysis.
• Own photonic device and circuit blocks from specification through tapeout, characterization, and product integration.
• Partner with photonics test and automation teams on design-for-test, measurement plans, automated test data pipelines, and lab characterization.
• Maintain component-library pcells, compact models, behavioral and physical models, calibration and control algorithms, regression tests, documentation, reviews, and mentoring.

Requirements

• PhD or MS in electrical engineering, optics, physics, computer science, or a related field, or a Bachelor's degree with equivalent experience.
• Experience building inverse-design or other computational-design tools that produced fabricated and measured devices on commercial integrated-photonics foundry platforms.
• Strong software engineering skills, including Python, autodiff frameworks, version control, and maintainable shared code.
• Experience with electromagnetic simulation using FDTD, FEM, or RCWA.
• Hands-on laboratory characterization correlated to simulation.
• Must be a U.S. person under ITAR or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export-control license.

Nice to have

• Machine learning or agentic AI applied to engineering design.
• Control systems, calibration, or system identification for tunable photonic circuits.
• Photonic layout and PDK tooling such as gdsfactory, KLayout, or Cadence.
• Laser or VCSEL design and modeling.
• 3D heterogeneous integration or co-packaged optics.
• Contributions to open-source electromagnetic or design tools such as Meep.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced environment at a high-growth, Series D-funded space company.
• Opportunity to join as a founding member of the photonics team and help establish design tools and practices.
• Paid time off, medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Life insurance, paid parental leave, equity, and additional benefits.