Photonics Analog Design Engineer

About the role

You will design the electronic-photonic interface circuits at a semiconductor company working on silicon photonics, building the transimpedance amplifiers, modulator drivers, and control loops that connect electronics to light. Photonics analog designers work at an exciting frontier: their circuits must amplify tiny photocurrents at tens of gigahertz, drive optical modulators with precise high-speed signals, and stabilize photonic components against thermal drift. You will enable the optical interconnects that will carry the next generation of datacenter and AI cluster traffic. You will also co-design the thermal control loops with the photonics team, since microring resonance drifts picometers per degree and your electronics must hold wavelength lock continuously.

What you will achieve

• Design transimpedance amplifiers for optical receivers achieving the bandwidth, noise, and dynamic range required for multi-gigabit optical links.
• Design modulator drivers delivering high-speed, high-swing signals to Mach-Zehnder or ring modulators with the linearity and jitter performance optical links demand.
• Implement control loops for photonic component stabilization including thermal tuning, wavelength locking, and bias control with robust operation across conditions.
• Model the electro-optical interface including photodiode characteristics, modulator behavior, and packaging parasitics, incorporating them into the circuit design flow.
• Optimize photonic interface circuits for power efficiency, since optical link power budgets are stringent and every milliwatt matters at scale.
• Validate photonic interfaces through coordinated electro-optical measurements, correlating circuit-level performance with optical link metrics such as bit error rate and eye diagrams under thermal variation.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 5 to 8 years of experience in high-speed analog design with exposure to optical communication or silicon photonics.
• Deep understanding of transimpedance amplifier design: noise-bandwidth tradeoffs, stability with photodiode capacitance, and dynamic range.
• Strong high-speed circuit design skills for broadband amplifiers, drivers, and limiting amplifiers at multi-GHz rates.
• Knowledge of photonic components including photodiodes, modulators, and their electrical characteristics and modeling.
• Experience with control loop design for thermal stabilization or bias control applications.
• Proficiency with advanced simulation including transient noise and EM-aware flows for high-speed layouts.
• Ability to collaborate across electronics and photonics disciplines, bridging different technical cultures.

Nice-to-haves

• Direct experience with silicon photonics platforms and PDKs.
• Familiarity with co-packaged optics architectures and their system implications.
• Knowledge of DSP-based optical receivers and coherent detection.
• Background in optical communication standards and link budgeting.