Field Application Engineer - Optical Circuit Switching

Salience Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Salience Labs Ltd seeks a seasoned Field Applications Engineer to own the technical dialogue with customers from qualification to design reviews. You will demonstrate the switch in real environments, build and run live test setups, and analyze failures on the spot.

Travel to customer sites and occasional UK HQ visits are involved. You will feed field feedback back into product and engineering, influencing roadmap and sales strategy while engaging senior engineers and business leaders with

Qualifications

• Experience in hardware, optics or photonics is required.
• 5+ years in a customer facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer or Systems Engineer.
• Strong understanding of high-speed interfaces and hardware bring-up workflows.
• Proven ability to run live demos and test setups with customers.
• Ability to translate field feedback into product and engineering actions.

Responsibilities

• Own technical conversations with clients, from qualification to design reviews.
• Demonstrate how our switch fits their setup with live demos.
• Build and run test setups and demos; debug during live deployments.
• Perform root-cause analysis for demo failures and drive improvements.
• Capture client feedback for product and engineering teams.
• Engage senior engineers and executives with credibility in person.

Skills

Hardware

Optics

Photonics

Customer facing

Demos & test setups

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