Field Application Engineer - Optical Circuit Switching

Salience Labs Ltd; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Salience Labs Limited is seeking a technically seasoned Field Applications Engineer to lead presales conversations, live demos, and design reviews with customers in the photonic and high-speed networking space.

You will own test setups, live demonstrations, and root-cause analysis, collaborating with product and engineering teams while engaging senior engineers and business leaders alike. Expect travel across customers in the USA and occasional trips to partners.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a customer facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer or Systems Engineer.
• Experience with hardware, optics or photonics and with high-speed interfaces.
• Hands-on debugging and lab/demo setup experience.

Responsibilities

• Own every technical conversation with the client during presales, demos and design reviews.
• Show, live, how the switch fits their hardware setup.
• Build and run test setups and demos to prove capabilities.
• Debug on the spot when a demo doesn't go to plan.
• Drive failure analysis to root cause and capture learnings for product teams.
• Turn client feedback into actionable input for product, engineering and sales.
• Be the technical thread through the entire sales cycle and communicate to execs.

Skills

Hardware

Optics

Photonics

Customer-facing experience

High-speed interfaces

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or Physics

Tools

Test equipment (Oscilloscope)

Fiber optic testing tools

Job description

The Role

You’ll be the face of our technology in every room that matters, proving, not just pitching, that our switch is the answer. From presales qualification to live demos to design reviews, you own the client conversation end to end, at our office or theirs, hardware in hand. You build the test setups, run the demos, and dig into the failure analysis when something breaks, because credibility here is earned, not claimed. And everything you learn feeds straight back into product, engineering, and sales.

Responsibilities

• Own every technical conversation with the client, covering qualification, demos, and design reviews, wherever their hardware lives
• Show, live, exactly how our switch fits their setup
• Build and run the test setups and demos that prove it
• Debug on the spot when a demo doesn't go to plan
• Drive failure analysis to root cause
• Turn client feedback into sharp, actionable input for product, engineering, and sales
• Be the technical thread running through the entire sales cycle
• Command a room of senior engineers, then pivot to the executive suite, without missing a beat

What We’re Looking For

• You’ll have experience in hardware, optics, or photonics
• 5 or more years in a customer facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer, Systems Engineer, or something similar
• A solid grasp of high speed interfaces, system level architecture, and hardware bring up workflows
• Sharp debugging instincts across optics, hardware, firmware, and software: you can chase complex, ambiguous problems in a live customer environment, not just a controlled demo
• A proven track record of hands on work: test setups, live demos, failure analysis, not just slides
• Experience owning presales technical conversations, and turning field feedback into product/engineering action
• The presence to be trusted onsite, clear and credible with senior engineers and nontechnical business leaders alike, in the same day
• Adaptable and pragmatic: startup energy

Additional Info

• Travel: customers are mostly based in the Bay Area, with additional travel across the USA and occasional trips to the UK headquarters for key customer visits. Expect less than 20% travel beyond the Bay Area

Salience Labs Limited is a leader in photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure. Backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Münster in Germany, Salience’s innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads.