Photonics Test Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Boston

Employment Type: FullTime

About Ayo

Ayo is a venture-backed early-stage startup that will radically redefine how humanity performs computing for AI. Our photonic processors will provide orders of magnitude improvement in speed and power efficiency in comparison to conventional digital compute platforms by taking advantage of the natural parallelism, speed, and energy efficiency of light.

The Role

We are seeking a Photonics Test Engineer to serve as a core team member and among the first employees at Ayo. You will be responsible for operating and expanding our automated wafer-level test capabilities, writing the scripts that run them, and executing hands-on measurements that feed directly into our design and fabrication cycles. You will serve as the hands and eyes of the integrated photonics team, capturing and preparing the data that will shape the decisions we make on every chip we build.

What You'll Do

- Use our automated wafer prober to measure integrated photonic devices

- Write automated probing scripts in Python to control test equipment and collect data

- Devise and build manual test setups and execute measurements

- Prepare and analyze test data for the integrated photonics team

What We're Looking For

- Expertise using standard photonic test equipment, including tunable lasers, photodetectors, spectrum analyzers, and fiber optic components

- Expertise using standard electronic test equipment, including source measurement units, oscilloscopes, multimeters, and power supplies

- Strong Python and/or MATLAB skills applied to instrument control, data collection, or analysis

- Comfortable working with fiber optic components and semiconductor probing equipment in a lab environment

- Familiarity with the fundamentals of integrated photonics

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with automated wafer-level test equipment, such as automated wafer probers

- Experience testing photonic integrated circuits

Why Ayo

• You'll be the first photonics test engineer on the team - your work will directly shape how we validate our chips and build our prototypes.

• We are working on a genuinely hard and interesting problem: unseating the GPU as the dominant AI compute platform.

• Early-stage means real ownership, real impact, and meaningful equity.

• Competitive salary. Equity commensurate with stage and seniority. Benefits package including health, dental, and vision.

• Fully onsite in Boston - we are a collaborative, in-person team.