About Neurophos

The demand for new data centers and AI compute is rapidly outpacing the planet's energy capacity. Digital solutions are hitting a power wall as we approach the physical limits of traditional silicon. Conquering this bottleneck means rethinking the fundamental architecture of inference compute. The industry's current path can't meet the need, so we're taking a different approach.

Instead of traditional electronic circuits, we use silicon photonics and an active, programmable metasurface to perform matrix multiplications at the speed of light. Our optical cells are 10,000x smaller than traditional photonic components, enabling unprecedented density. By using photonics instead of electricity, our chips become more efficient as they scale. This architecture will deliver up to 100 times the energy efficiency of existing solutions while significantly improving performance for large-scale AI inference.

We’ve assembled a world-class team of industry veterans and recently raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier. Participants include M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Carbon Direct Capital, Aramco Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, Space Capital, and others.

Join us and shape the future of computing!

Location: Austin, TX. Full-time onsite position.

Reports To: Photonics Characterization Lead

FLSA Status: Exempt

Position Overview

Neurophos is hiring an electro-optics engineer to build and run the test and characterization of the lasers and optical amplifiers behind our photonic AI processors.

You will own the bench that measures our narrow-linewidth seed lasers and high-speed pulsed sources. This includes relative intensity noise (RIN), phase noise, timing jitter, linewidth, pulse shape, and the RF drive that generates the pulses. Your results will guide source selection and the performance specs we set with vendors.

You will work closely with the amplifier, transmit PIC, receiver, and electronics teams. This is a hands-on lab role: you will build setups, collect data, and turn it into clear pass/fail answers.

Key Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain the laser and amplifier characterization bench, including polarization-maintaining fiber setups at watt-level optical power.

Measure RIN from ~kHz to tens of GHz at the source and through amplifier chains. This includes shot-noise subtraction and integration over the receiver bandwidth.

Measure laser linewidth and frequency noise (delayed self-heterodyne or equivalent), wavelength stability, side-mode suppression, and polarization extinction ratio.

Characterize high-speed pulsed sources at tens of GHz: pulse width and shape (log scale), pulse-to-pulse amplitude uniformity, and timing jitter.

Measure RF phase noise of synthesizers and clock chains, and residual (additive) phase noise of the full electro-optic chain. Convert phase noise to integrated jitter.

Set up and run the RF drive for electro-optic modulators: Ka-band amplifiers, filters, phase alignment, and modulator bias control.

Characterize optical amplifiers: gain, noise figure, saturation, added RIN, and correlated versus uncorrelated noise between channels.

Automate measurements and build a data pipeline (Python, instrument control) to make results repeatable and traceable.

Turn data into specs: write test procedures, set pass/fail thresholds, and evaluate vendor samples against them.

Work with vendors on sample evaluation and data requests, and with internal teams on system-level noise and timing budgets.

Qualifications

MS or PhD in electrical engineering, physics, optics, or photonics.

Hands-on lab work with narrow-linewidth lasers (DFB, external-cavity or fiber lasers) at 1550 nm, from industry (3+ years) or from graduate research.

Direct experience measuring RIN and laser phase or frequency noise, and understanding what limits each measurement (shot noise, thermal noise, instrument floors).

Experience characterizing high-speed pulsed or modulated optical signals: fast photodetectors, sampling oscilloscopes, autocorrelation, optical spectrum analysis.