Demo

Photonics Chip Lead

Celestial AI
Santa Clara, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 1/3/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 3/15/2026
About Celestial AI

As Generative AI continues to advance, the performance drivers for data center infrastructure are shifting from systems-on-chip (SOCs) to systems of chips. In the era of Accelerated Computing, data center bottlenecks are no longer limited to compute performance, but rather the system’s interconnect bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity. Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric™ is the next-generation interconnect technology that delivers a tenfold increase in performance and energy efficiency compared to competing solutions.

The Photonic Fabric™ is available to our customers in multiple technology offerings, including optical interface chiplets, optical interposers, and Optical Multi-chip Interconnect Bridges (OMIB). This allows customers to easily incorporate high bandwidth, low power, and low latency optical interfaces into their AI accelerators and GPUs. The technology is fully compatible with both protocol and physical layers, including standard 2.5D packaging processes. This seamless integration enables XPUs to utilize optical interconnects for both compute-to-compute and compute-to-memory fabrics, achieving bandwidths in the tens of terabits per second with nanosecond latencies.

This innovation empowers hyperscalers to enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI processing by optimizing the XPUs required for training and inference, while significantly reducing the TCO2 impact. To bolster customer collaborations, Celestial AI is developing a Photonic Fabric ecosystem consisting of tier-1 partnerships that include custom silicon/ASIC design, system integrators, HBM memory, assembly, and packaging suppliers.

About The Role

We are seeking a Photonics Chip Lead that can own the delivery of product PICs for Celestial’s industry-leading scale-up network offerings. The role requires deep expertise and experience in Silicon Photonics system, block & device design, IC design EDA tools and PIC/ASIC co-design.

Essential Duties And Responsibilities

  • Delivery of Photonic ICs (PICs) for Celestial’s key product segments.
  • Drive critical aspects of PIC design, including photonic architecture & routing, schematic capture & modeling and physical design.
  • Work in conjunction with broader analog, digital and packaging teams to ensure PIC meets all product specifications and integration requirements.
  • Contribute to the design of Silicon Photonic devices and subsystems to augment the Celestial Photonics PDK.

Qualifications

Specialized skills

  • Strong experience with complete Silicon Photonics PIC development (architecture, routing, link-budget development, system integration)
  • Strong experience with modeling of photonic circuits and with simulation of Silicon Photonics components using standard tools (Lumerical, Photon Design, RSoft, VPI or similar)
  • Experience with physical design/layout tools (Cadence, Mentor or similar)
  • Experience with PIC co-design with ASICs and digital control blocks
  • Experience with data analysis tools (JMP, DataConductor or similar)

Education Requirements

  • Minimum MS in engineering or physics. PhD is preferred.

Experience Requirements

  • Minimum 10 years of relevant experience

Attributes

  • Self-starter
  • Thrives in a highly collaborative and dynamic work environment
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills
  • Creativity in problem-solving with strong attention to detail

LOCATION: Santa Clara, CA

For California Location:

As an early stage start up, we offer an extremely attractive total compensation package inclusive of competitive base salary, bonus and a generous grant of our valuable early-stage equity. The target base salary for this role is approximately $195,000.00 - $235,000.00. The base salary offered may be slightly higher or lower than the target base salary, based on the final scope as determined by the depth of the experience and skills demonstrated by candidate in the interviews.

We offer great benefits (health, vision, dental and life insurance), collaborative and continuous learning work environment, where you will get a chance to work with smart and dedicated people engaged in developing the next generation architecture for high performance computing.

Celestial AI Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.

Salary : $195,000 - $235,000

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