PSL-posted 26 days ago
Full-time • Mid Level
Hybrid • Seattle, WA
11-50 employees
Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities

Paraxial is building the first AI-native optical design platform, a modern successor to legacy tools like Zemax and Code V. Optical systems drive AR/VR, LiDAR, robotics, aerospace, and biomedical imaging - yet the tools used to design them are outdated, slow, and fundamentally incompatible with modern compute and AI. We're rebuilding the stack from first principles: natural-language spec-to-model, high-performance ray tracing, intelligent design exploration, hybrid AI tolerancing, and CAD-native integration. With hundreds of optical engineers already on the waitlist and enterprise design partners ready to begin pilots, we're hiring a CTO to architect and ship the beginning of the platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will build the first working iteration of Paraxial, make the architectural decisions that define its long-term future, and grow the engineering organization around your technical vision.

  • The end-to-end architecture of Paraxial's early product
  • Technical decisions across backend, orchestration, data modeling, optimization workflows, and early simulation integration
  • Rapid prototyping of core workflows (spec → model → optimization → results)
  • Interfaces to external engines (ZOS-API or alternatives) and, eventually, modernized high-performance cores
  • Early LLM integration workflows
  • Development of reproducibility, logging, and correctness foundations
  • Engineering culture, documentation, and hiring the first technical team
  • Long-term decisions on HPC, GPU, ML, and CAD infrastructure - selecting the right tools for the job rather than adhering to a specific stack
  • You are a senior/principal-level engineer with deep experience building zero-to-one products in technically complex domains. You have strong command over:
  • System design across backend, compute, and data layers
  • Building and shipping simulation-heavy or data-intensive workflows
  • Working with performance-sensitive code, whether in C++, Python, or another modern language
  • Choosing and integrating the right technology (C++, Python, CUDA, GPU libraries, ML frameworks, rendering engines, etc.) based on constraints
  • Architecting pipelines that involve optimization, numerical analysis, or scientific computation
  • Writing pragmatic, reliable code while moving quickly
  • Ability to independently deliver a working product slice in weeks, not quarters
  • Strong intuition for glueing together APIs, LLMs, numerical code, and UI
  • Clear communication with non-software domain experts
  • Bias toward shipping, learning, and iterating
  • Comfort owning ambiguous, open-ended problem spaces
  • Experience with simulation, rendering, robotics, AV, computational physics, or optimization
  • Exposure to ray tracing, geometric optics, or optical system design
  • Experience working in AR/VR, imaging, or any hardware-adjacent industry
  • Build the foundational technical architecture of a next-generation engineering platform
  • Work at the intersection of physics, AI, simulation, and human creativity
  • Direct exposure to real optical engineers shaping the future of hardware
  • The opportunity to reinvent an entire industry's core tools
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