About the role
You investigate whether emerging interconnect technologies can genuinely improve future personal or connected compute, under realistic cost and power limits. The honest answer is often no, and being able to establish that quickly and clearly is as valuable here as finding the case where it is yes.
The work
Evaluate optical links or other advanced interconnect approaches against electrical baselines. Study packaging, conversion overhead, reliability and manufacturability with specialist partners. Keep the research tied to a measured bottleneck and a plausible product-scale use case.
What good looks like
In your first 90 days, deliver a literature-grounded feasibility study and a bounded experiment with explicit performance and commercialization assumptions.
Evidence we look for
Bring research expertise in photonics, high-speed interconnects, applied physics or related engineering. Strong experimental judgment and an ability to explain physical limits are essential.
What we need to see
- Research expertise in photonics, high-speed interconnects, applied physics, or closely related engineering
- Strong experimental judgement: you design the experiment that would falsify your hypothesis
- You can explain a physical limit to people who will make a product decision on it
- Intellectual honesty about cost and power realities rather than laboratory conditions
Nice to have
- Silicon photonics or co-packaged optics
- Published work with reproducible results
- Industry as well as academic experience
The exercise
Compare an optical and electrical link for a concrete workload, including all conversion, packaging, energy and validation costs.
Where and how we work
In the office together five days a week, in any of these cities. Remote-friendly around your family, arranged one person at a time.