Photonic IC Design Engineer, Design Automation & Modeling

K2 Space•Seattle, WA

About The Position

K2 is hiring a Photonic IC Design Engineer focused on design automation and modeling to build and own the photonics team's design flow. The role spans software and tools that take requirements through fabrication-ready, DRC-clean designs whose measured performance matches simulation. The flow will incorporate inverse and AI-guided design, parametric layout generation, fabrication-aware models, and automated verification. The engineer will develop the tools, component library, and models used by the team and by operational calibration and control of tunable circuits, working closely with test and automation teams to ensure designs are testable and measurements feed back into models. The engineer will also own device blocks on product photonic integrated circuit tapeouts and take them from design through lab measurement, proving the flow on shipped parts. As a founding member of the photonics team, this person will help establish the tools and design practices the team will grow on. The position supports photonic payload development for K2 spacecraft and collaboration with electronics and ASIC teams on system co-design.

Requirements

PhD or MS in electrical engineering, optics, physics, computer science, or a related field, or a Bachelor's degree with equivalent experience.
Experience building 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 using FDTD, FEM, or RCWA.
Hands-on lab characterization correlated to simulation.

Nice To Haves

Machine learning or agentic AI applied to engineering design.
Control systems, calibration, or system identification for tunable photonic circuits.
Photonic layout and PDK tooling such as gdsfactory, KLayout, or Cadence.
Laser or VCSEL design and modeling.
3D heterogeneous integration or co-packaged optics.
Contributions to open-source electromagnetic or design tools such as Meep.

Responsibilities

Own the photonic design automation flow, including parametric layout generation, simulation orchestration, design-space exploration, and automated DRC/LVS and sign-off across integrated photonics foundry platforms.
Build and maintain fabrication-aware inverse design, including topology optimization in JAX or PyTorch, lithography models, and robustness to process variation.
Bring agentic and AI-guided tools into the design loop for design-space exploration, layout generation, optimization, and data analysis.
Own device and circuit blocks on product PICs from specification through tapeout and characterization, such as polarization handling, low-loss routing, mode converters, vertical couplers for 3D integration, and wideband devices.
Partner with the photonics test and automation team to incorporate design-for-test, create test structures and probe- and fiber-array-compatible layouts, define measurement plans and metrics, and connect the flow to the shared test data pipeline.
Characterize devices in the lab and on automated test stations, measure insertion loss, extinction, bandwidth, and high-speed electro-optic response, assess simulation-to-measurement error, and use results to update model calibrations, design rules, and the flow.
Maintain pcells and compact models for the component library, including regression tests to ensure flow and PDK changes do not break existing designs.
Extend models into calibration and control for tunable PICs, including thermal tuning, resonator locking, and modulator bias; derive algorithms from design models and update them using test-station calibration data.
Develop behavioral and physical models of photonic circuits, links, lasers, and gain media, and support system co-design with electronics and ASIC teams.
Make the flow usable across the team through documentation, reviews, and mentoring.