Photonics Applications Engineer

EMode Photonix LLC.; Boulder (CO); Hybrid; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Job summary

EMode Photonix LLC. in Boulder, Colorado, is seeking a content-focused engineer to produce technical marketing materials, tutorials, and documentation for our photonics simulation product.

You will run evaluations with customers, build device models, deliver webinars, and help maintain our knowledge base and online presence. This role blends deep technical insight with clear communication, enabling adoption by researchers and industry partners.

Qualifications

• Experience creating technical content for photonics or related fields.
• Ability to run webinars and present to audiences of researchers and engineers.
• Strong written communication for tutorials, notes, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Write application notes and design tutorials on industry devices like resonators and couplers.
• Own documentation and the example library, including updates and maintenance.
• Run webinars and record walkthroughs; present at relevant conferences.
• Support evaluations: scope problems, build models, and drive results.
• Handle first-line technical support and triage issues to engineering.
• Maintain LinkedIn, newsletters, and website content.
• Report user feedback to the development team about requests and confusion.

Skills

Technical marketing

Documentation

Webinars

Customer support

Content strategy

Job description

About EMode

EMode develops simulation software for integrated photonics. The company was founded in Boulder in 2021 around an eigenmode solver with a Python scripting interface. Since then the product has grown into a three-dimensional eigenmode expansion package that research groups and companies use to design waveguides, resonators, couplers, arrayed waveguide gratings, and nonlinear and quantum photonic devices.

Our current development is aimed closing the gap between a photonic device simulation/design and the device experimental performance after fabrication. We want designers to optimize against the performance they will actually receive, including realistic geometry, scattering loss, thermal and electrical effects, and nonlinear response, from a single component up through a full circuit. Doing this at practical speed requires methods that are orders of magnitude more efficient than the conventional ones, so that a designer can sweep parameters, run optimizations, and carry fabrication tolerances through the analysis.

Working at EMode

We are a small team, growing to meet demand from academia, industry, and enterprise photonics development. The people who join in this round will have a direct hand in how the company and the product develop.

• You will have close feedback from users, helping guide our product development to create real value and impact in our customers' workflows.
• Releases go out every few weeks, so your work is quickly in users' hands.
• We work on site in Boulder, Colorado. The team is collaborative with decisions about the roadmap, the architecture, and hiring.
• Much of the work begins with new derivations: nonlinear electromagnetics, mode theory, semiconductor device physics, and numerical linear algebra. We support publishing results when appropriate.
• Every position includes stock options, sized to reflect joining at an early stage.
• As an early employee you will have more responsibility than the same title would carry at a larger company, and you will help establish the practices of our growing team.

The Role

Our customers are photonics researchers and design engineers. They decide whether to try EMode when something they have read or watched shows them it will solve a problem they have. This position produces that material and all other public content for the EMode brand.

About half of the work is technical marketing: application notes, tutorial models, documentation, webinars, short videos, and conference demonstrations that show what EMode does on real devices. The other half is direct work with prospects and users: running evaluations, building a model of a customer’s device, answering support questions, and reporting back to engineering on what can be improved.

For such a technical product sold to photonics experts and specialists, the content has to come from someone who is also an expert and can run realistic demonstrations.

What You Will Do

• Write application notes and design tutorials on the industry-relevant devices: nonlinear frequency conversion, resonators, couplers, arrayed waveguide gratings, detectors, etc.
• Own the documentation and the example library, including updates and maintenance
• Run webinars and record short walkthroughs, and present and demonstrate at relevant conferences
• Support evaluations: scope the user’s problem, build a representative model, and get them to a result they can use
• Handle first-line technical support and triage issues to engineering
• Keep our LinkedIn presence, newsletter, and website content current
• Report what you learn from users and prospects back to the development team: what they asked for, what confused them, and where we lost them

What Success Looks Like in the First Year

• A library of application notes and tutorials that takes a new user to a working design in an afternoon
• Inbound evaluation requests increase tenfold and lead to new sales