Engineer - Micro/Nanofabrication

Pumpkinseed; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ground-floor opportunity

Series A backed by investors

Active contracts with Genentech/BARDA

Job summary

Pumpkinseed is seeking a PhD-level fabrication scientist to scale single-molecule nanophotonic sensors from research to wafer-scale manufacturing in Palo Alto, California. You will own end-to-end lithography, etch, and thin-film processes and drive high-yield, CMOS-compatible production.

You'll collaborate with photonics designers, chemists, biologists, and ML engineers to align device capabilities with system requirements and transfer processes to foundries for large-scale production.

Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Materials Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, or related field with hands-on cleanroom fabrication.
• Extensive cleanroom experience including high-resolution electron-beam lithography and photolithography.
• Experience with RIE/ICP dry etch, BOE wet etch, and various thin-film deposition methods.
• Strong ability to learn new tools quickly and work with cross-functional teams.
• Fluency in nanoscale metrology and characterization techniques such as SEM, AFM, and ellipsometry.

Responsibilities

• Fabrication: Own end-to-end nanofabrication flows in university and national-lab cleanrooms — electron-beam and photolithography, RIE and wet etching, and thin-film deposition to realize state of the art single-molecule nanophotonic sensors.
• Characterization & Metrology: Close the loop between design and realized device fabrication with electron microscopy, thin-film metrology, elemental analysis, and high-resolution optical characterization.
• Integration & Testing: Develop, optimize, and troubleshoot processes for integrating devices, rigorously testing their compatibility and performance with chemical and biological systems.
• Process Development: Take a fabrication step from first principles to a validated, reproducible, high-yield process.
• Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with photonic designers, chemists, biologists, and machine learning engineers.
• Foundry Transfer: Work with semiconductor vendor and foundry partners to transfer designs and processes for manufacturing at wafer scale.

Skills

Cleanroom experience

Electron-beam lithography

Photolithography

RIE/ICP dry etch

BOE wet etch

Thin-film deposition

Metrology & characterization

SEM

AFM

Ellipsometry

Education

M.S. or Ph.D. in Materials Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, or related field

Tools

RIE/ICP equipment

ALD systems

CVD/PECVD/evap/sputtering

Nanofabrication tooling

Job description

About Pumpkinseed: Biology is the most information-dense system we know of, and most of that information has never been read. We're building the platform to change that. Our vision is to do for the proteome what NGS did for the genome: make it readable, at scale. Our technology merges nanophotonics, new chemical toolkits, and machine learning to read the complete molecular alphabet of any protein, known or unknown, at single-molecule resolution.

The Role: Pumpkinseed is making a strategic bet that the same forces scaling computing — photonics and semiconductor manufacturing — are what will finally let us read biology at scale. NGS made the genome readable by riding the semiconductor cost curve. We're doing the same for the proteome.

Every protein we sequence is read out on a nanophotonic device with features smaller than the wavelength of light. Reading the proteome at the volume it demands means patterning these devices the way chips are patterned — billions at a time, identically, across a wafer.

In this role, you'll develop the lithography, etch, thin-film, and surface processes that define our single-molecule sensing structures, and take them from a working device in a research cleanroom to a manufacturable process that holds at wafer scale and transfers to CMOS-compatible, high-volume fab. You'll build the metrology and characterization loop that enables a robust, high-yield process running the same way across millions of sites and thousands of wafers.

You’ll own the process that makes mining biology at semiconductor scale possible — where leading-edge nanofabrication and large-scale manufacturing are genuinely the same problem.

What You’ll Do

• Fabrication: Own end-to-end nanofabrication flows in university and national-lab cleanrooms — electron-beam and photolithography, RIE and wet etching, and thin-film deposition to realize state of the art single-molecule nanophotonic sensors.
• Characterization & Metrology: Close the loop between design and realized device fabrication with electron microscopy, thin-film metrology, elemental analysis, and high-resolution optical characterization — using data to understand why a process succeeds or fails.
• Integration & Testing: Develop, optimize, and troubleshoot processes for integrating devices, rigorously testing their compatibility and performance with chemical and biological systems.
• Process Development: Take a fabrication step from first principles to a validated, reproducible, high-yield process.
• Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with photonic designers, chemists, biologists, and machine learning engineers to align chip capabilities with broader system requirements.
• Foundry Transfer: Work with semiconductor vendor and foundry partners to transfer designs and processes for manufacturing of wafer-scale

What We’re Looking For

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Materials Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related field — with hands-on fabrication at the center of your training. (Exceptional B.S.-level candidates with deep cleanroom experience will be considered.)
• Extensive cleanroom experience, including high-resolution electron-beam lithography,photolithography, RIE/ICP dry etch, BOE wet etch, ALD and other thin-film deposition (CVD, PECVD, evap, sputtering, etc).
• Demonstrated ability and comfort in quickly learning new tools, equipment, and experimental workflows.
• Fluency in nanoscale metrology and characterization: SEM, AFM, ellipsometry

Why Pumpkinseed

• Ground-floor opportunity to invent the fabrication process at the core of a category-defining protein-sequencing platform — the kind of leading-edge nanofabrication that rarely gets a direct, immediate path to real-world deployment.
• Series A backed by NFX and Future Ventures.
• Active contracts from Genentech, BARDA, and DARPA demonstrating real-world demand across commercial and government applications.
• $10B+ addressable market spanning protein sequencing, proprietary biological data, and AI licensing.