K2 Space
Photonic IC Design Engineer, Design Automation & Modeling
$130K–$200K
Seattle, WA +1 · Full-time · Posted Oct 23, 2026
- Location
- Seattle, WA
Seattle, Washington, United States - Education
- PhD or MS in electrical engineering, optics, physics, computer science, or a related field, or a Bachelor's degree with equivalent experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- Must be a U.S. person as defined by ITAR or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export control license.
About the job
Own the photonic IC design automation and modeling flow, and design, fabricate, and characterize device and circuit blocks for product photonic integrated circuits.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain automated layout, simulation, inverse-design, verification, and component-modeling tools.
- Design and characterize product PIC device and circuit blocks, using measurement results to calibrate models and improve the flow.
- Develop test, calibration, and control workflows and collaborate with photonics test, electronics, and ASIC teams.
What they ask for
- Built inverse-design or other computational design tools that produced fabricated, 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 (FDTD, FEM, or RCWA) and hands-on lab characterization correlated to simulation.
Nice to have
- Machine learning or agentic AI applied to engineering design.
- Control systems, calibration, or system identification for tunable photonic circuits.
Pay
$130,000 - $200,000 USD base salary
Tools
Python, JAX, PyTorch, FDTD, FEM, RCWA, gdsfactory, KLayout
AI focus
Use inverse design and AI-guided or agentic tools for photonic design-space exploration, layout generation, optimization, and data analysis.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative