Join our fast-paced and passionate team as a Director of Photonics Project Engineering. As we scale, you will be instrumental in building our foundation from the ground up. This is a dynamic, hands-on role for a self-starter who thrives in a fluid startup environment. You'll have the opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies, work closely with leadership, and develop and implement engineering practices that support our mission and growth. Your key responsibilities are as follows:

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of photonics project engineers.
• Set best practices for project engineering, program execution, and technical accountability.
• Align project engineers to programs based on technical complexity, risk, and resource needs.
• Foster a culture of ownership, rigor, transparency, and continuous improvement.

Project Ownership

• Own end-to-end execution for new photonics systems and modules, including:
• Schedule development and tracking
• Budget planning and cost control
• Resource planning and prioritization
• Drive cross-functional execution across optics, lasers, PICs, electronics, firmware, mechanical, manufacturing, reliability, and supply chain.
• Lead phase-gate or milestone-based development processes (concept, prototype, EVT/DVT/PVT, production release).
• Proactively identify technical, schedule, cost, and supply risks and drive mitigation plans.

Technical Project Leadership

• Ensure strong technical alignment across disciplines for complex photonics architectures.
• Guide trade studies involving performance, reliability, manufacturability, and cost.
• Ensure design decisions consider high-volume manufacturing, yield, reliability, and long-term scalability.
• Partner with reliability and quality teams to ensure robust qualification and validation plans.

Stakeholder & Executive Communication

• Provide clear status reporting to executive leadership.
• Communicate risks, tradeoffs, and recovery plans effectively.
• Serve as the primary execution interface between engineering, operations, and product leadership.