Lightmatter jobs, judged for you, free

What they do

Lightmatter makes photonic chips for AI. They use light to move data between thousands or millions of processors in data centers. Its Passage products include a 3D-stacked photonic engine and co-packaged optics (optics built into the chip package). Guide is its light source for them. MIT researchers founded Lightmatter in 2017. Its Series D raised $400M at a $4.4B value.

What they value

• We care about people: trust, respect, and speaking the truth.
• We are here to win: speed, precision, and focus.
• We're delivering the future: reliable products and keeping your word.
• We follow first principles: understand, innovate, be original.
• We are one Lightmatter: no silos, and impact beats titles.
• High standards and high collaboration.

Where they hire

Lightmatter hires in Mountain View, California, Boston, and Toronto. Many roles are open in more than one of these cities. Mountain View has the most, 38 roles. Every posting offers a flexible, hybrid workplace. No role is remote. Every posting says that applicants must be able to comply with US export control laws. No posting mentions visa sponsorship.

Teams and roles

Almost every role is in engineering. Photonics and silicon engineering is the largest group, with 19 roles.

• Photonics and silicon: analog chip design, physical design and timing, design checks, and laser and photonic systems design.
• Product engineering: eight roles that test, bring up, and validate hardware and photonic chips in Mountain View.
• Architecture and digital design: architects and engineers for the digital and mixed-signal parts of the chips.
• Packaging: signal integrity, power integrity, thermal, and mechanical design for chip packages.
• Firmware and embedded software: the device software for the photonic products, and test automation for it.
• Machine learning: researchers who model how AI training and inference run on systems built with Passage.

There is also a winter 2026 internship in photonics testing in Boston. Every posting gives a pay range. US roles pay from $119,000 to $320,000, and Toronto roles are paid in Canadian dollars.

What they look for

Most roles ask for a master's degree or PhD in electrical engineering, photonics, physics, or a related field. Senior roles often ask for eight to twelve or more years in industry. Chip design roles ask for Cadence or Synopsys tools, and many ask for chips that went to production (tape-outs). Many roles work on high-speed links such as SerDes. A SerDes (serializer/deserializer) circuit turns parallel data into one fast stream and back. Most roles ask for scripting in Python, TCL, or a similar language to automate work. The machine learning researcher roles ask for a PhD, ten or more years, and published papers.