Principal Electro-Optical/Adaptive Optics Engineer, Fusion Systems

Xcimer Energy•Denver, CO

4d•$190,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

Xcimer Energy is seeking a Principal Electro-Optical/Adaptive Optics Engineer to serve as the technical authority for adaptive optics within the organization. This role involves leading the design, specification, procurement, and integration of a high-speed custom adaptive optics system for fusion beamlines. The engineer will own the system architecture, including requirements, performance budgets, and trade-offs related to bandwidth, stroke, and latency. They will also manage vendor relationships and oversee system commissioning. The position is deeply connected to the physics of energy delivery to the target, requiring prediction of far-field irradiance and focal-spot quality, and decomposition of the error budget. While not requiring hands-on bench work, the role demands the ability to define proof-of-concept experiments and direct optical engineers, laser scientists, and technicians. This is also a group-building role, where the individual will help shape the adaptive optics capability, including technical standards, development practices, hiring standards, and mentoring. Xcimer emphasizes rapid execution with real hardware, requiring governing equations and a first-order layout before commitment, followed by de-risking experiments.

Requirements

Advanced degree in optics, physics, electrical engineering, or a closely related field.
8+ years of optical science/engineering experience, including 5+ years in adaptive optics, wavefront sensing and control, or closely related high-speed optical control systems.
A track record of delivering adaptive optics or beam control systems in industry, national labs, or observatories.
Demonstrated ownership of adaptive optics requirements and performance budgets on a real program, including the wavefront error budget and its allocation across subsystems.
Demonstrated use of a wave-optics propagation code for system performance prediction, including codes you wrote yourself, and the ability to state and defend what the model does and does not capture.
Hands-on working knowledge of deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, and high-bandwidth feedback control, sufficient to specify them, review a vendor’s implementation, and judge whether a delivered system meets its requirements.
Ability to set and audit closed-loop control requirements: bandwidth, latency, sampling, reconstructor approach, and disturbance rejection.
Experience working directly with external vendors on custom optical and electro-optical systems, including specification negotiation and design reviews.
Experience directing the technical work of other engineers, scientists, or technicians through a substantial task.
Familiarity with high-energy or high-intensity laser systems and the constraints they place on optics, including damage threshold and thermal management.
Advanced verbal and written communication skills, including technical documentation, requirements definition, and presentation to internal and external audiences.
Willingness to travel to vendor facilities.
Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Nice To Haves

Experience with directed energy or other high-power/high-intensity laser platforms.
Experience delivering a custom adaptive optics system from concept through commissioning.
Experience with high-energy optics in the deep UV, including laser-induced damage, coating specification, and contamination control.
Experience with adaptive optics or wavefront correction on large-aperture, high-energy pulsed beamlines.
Experience with pulsed laser systems and the diagnostics used to characterize them.
Experience with wavefront diagnostics beyond Shack-Hartmann sensing (interferometry, phase retrieval, curvature or pyramid sensing).
Experience with predictive or optimal control, system identification, or reconstructor optimization applied to a real loop.
Familiarity with real-time software, FPGA-based control, or low-latency computing architectures.
Experience with beam pointing and jitter control, including opto-mechanical jitter analysis and vibration isolation.
Familiarity with STOP (structural-thermal-optical performance) analysis and its use in setting opto-mechanical requirements.
Experience with turbulence characterization in enclosed beam paths.
Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical teams, and building out a technical discipline within an organization.
Experience in multidisciplinary research laser facilities, such as national laboratories.
Experience in laboratory and operational environments that demand high reliability and uptime.
Experience writing scientific papers or program technical reports.

Responsibilities

Serve as technical lead for the adaptive optics system, from requirements definition through integration and commissioning.
Own adaptive optics and wavefront control requirements for the fusion beamlines, from top-level beam quality and energy-on-target objectives down to component and interface specifications.
Build and maintain the end-to-end performance model: wave-optics propagation through the beamline, prediction of far-field irradiance and focal-spot quality at target, and a wavefront error budget resolved into fitting, temporal, measurement, calibration, and non-common-path terms.
Own the disturbance model that drives it: beam path turbulence and gas density fluctuations, thermally induced aberration in amplifiers and transport optics, static figure error, opto-mechanical jitter, and pulse-to-pulse repeatability at operational repetition rate.
Set the resulting requirements on deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, reconstructors, and the real-time control loop, including actuator count and stroke, bandwidth, latency, and disturbance rejection budgets, and review vendor designs against them.
Lead trade studies and architecture decisions: correction topology, sensing approach and wavelength, sampling and control rates, and where the system is limited by physics rather than by hardware.
Ensure designs meet performance, reliability, and operability requirements, and identify technical risks with mitigation plans in coordination with program management.
Lead technical engagement with commercial and research vendors delivering adaptive optics components and subsystems.
Own the technical side of adaptive optics procurements and development subcontracts: statements of work, specification negotiation, vendor technical reviews, and acceptance criteria and testing, including deep-UV coating and damage-threshold requirements.
Plan and defend the resources the adaptive optics scope needs: scope, schedule, staffing, and build-versus-buy calls, including where a commercial system suffices and where development is unavoidable.
Oversee vendor design reviews, factory acceptance tests, and delivery milestones.
Act as the primary technical interface for resolving performance, schedule, and integration issues with suppliers.
Define the proof-of-concept and risk-reduction experiments that settle open questions, then direct optical engineers, laser scientists, and technicians to run them and interpret the results.
Define and review laboratory and in-situ test plans that validate performance and closed-loop operation, and approve the resulting test reports.
Provide guidance and best practices to other engineers in the assembly, integration, and test of the adaptive optics system within the beamline environment, including contamination-control discipline appropriate to deep-UV, high-fluence optics.
Work closely with beamline, controls, and laser system teams to ensure clean system integration and well-defined interfaces.
Work with control system engineers to integrate adaptive optics within the larger laser control system, helping define required controls, interlocks, and operator feedback.
Support commissioning activities and the transition to reliable, repeatable operations.
Author and defend artifacts in Xcimer’s gated design review process, and serve as a reviewer on others’ packages.
Establish technical standards, documentation practices, and development workflows for the adaptive optics group.
Mentor and guide engineers and scientists working on adaptive optics and wavefront control.
Participate in hiring and onboarding as the group expands.
Take on technology development that outlives any single program.