Optical Systems Engineer
EtchedVisit Etched website
Etched is an AI-hardware company building rack-scale frontier inference clusters.
San Jose, United States
Funding history
About Etched
Etched co-designs chips, racks, software, and manufacturing systems for efficient inference of frontier AI models, targeting throughput, latency, cost, and power efficiency across prefill and decode workloads.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will own optical interconnect architecture and implementation for accelerator systems. You will evaluate interconnect technologies, drive prototypes into volume production, integrate electrical-optical interfaces, work with suppliers, bring up and debug optical links, define manufacturing test strategies, and maintain optics documentation.
Requirements
- 5–10 years of optical interconnect, transceiver, or photonic system design experience
- Expertise in CPO, NPO, OCI, LPO, and emerging optical form factors
- Optical link engineering knowledge, including link-budget analysis, IL/RL, OSNR, eye diagrams, jitter, BER, and FEC margining
- Knowledge of laser sources, modulators, TIAs, and DSPs or retimers
- Knowledge of 100G/200G-per-lane PAM4 host interfaces
- Experience with OSFP and QSFP-DD
- Knowledge of photonic-electronic co-design and advanced packaging
- Knowledge of OCI, Open CPX, OIF, and UCIe standards
- Experience bringing up and debugging optical links and PIC-based subsystems
- Knowledge of liquid-cooled AI servers and cluster-scale optical fabrics
Responsibilities
- Lead optical link architecture and system design
- Evaluate and integrate next-generation interconnect technologies
- Drive prototypes through validation and volume production
- Implement electrical-optical interfaces in AI servers
- Engage module, laser, and PIC suppliers on specifications and integration
- Capture multi-rack interconnect requirements
- Bring up and debug optical interfaces
- Define optical bring-up strategies and manufacturing test equipment
- Own optics-related documentation
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- $500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits
- $2,500 monthly housing subsidy for eligible employees
- Relocation support
- Wellness benefits
- Daily lunch and dinner
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification