Optical Engineer - Memphis

The role

You will own the physical optical layer of AI compute clusters: fiber layout, link design, connector and polarity architecture, and optics selection. You will also lead factory tests, commissioning and debug of optical interconnects.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end optical and fiber design for AI training and inference fabrics, including cabling, panels, polarity, breakout, reach and connectors
• Write and verify link budgets for scale-out and scale-up interconnect, including loss, reflections, FEC and install margins
• Develop and implement factory tests for optical interconnects: insertion loss, return loss and polarization
• Select and qualify optics, fiber and connectivity; own vendor bring-up, failure analysis and fleet reliability of the optical layer
• Deploy and verify end-to-end optical interconnect into the manufacturing line
• Lead commissioning and debug using inspection, cleaning, power meter, OTDR, BER and FEC stats
• Evolve connectivity toward 800G / 1.6T, CPO/NPO awareness, tighter reaches and higher fiber count per rack
• Work with mechanical, network and facilities teams on structured cabling and raceways, including tray fill, bend radius, labeling and hall-scale build and repair

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, optical engineering, physics, or an engineering discipline
• 2+ years of professional experience in fiber layout, optical link design, and/or datacenter or HPC optical engineering
• Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed
• Must be willing to travel to manufacturing and datacenter sites
• Ability to work in active datacenter and factory environments, including fiber inspection, cleaning and live debug

Nice to have

• Demonstrated ownership of fiber or optical design installed and turned up in a datacenter, HPC or AI-compute environment
• Working command of single-mode vs multimode, MPO polarity, insertion/return loss and 100G+ transceiver classes
• Hands-on optical test: inspect/clean, power meter, OTDR or equivalent
• Fiber interconnect ownership for AI or high-compute clusters (GPU scale-out fabric, InfiniBand NDR/XDR, RoCE Ethernet 400/800G)
• High-density pre-terminated trunk/cassette design and rack-to-spine optical mapping at hall scale
• Optics vendor qualification at volume (OSFP, 800G DR8/2xFR4, AOCs)
• Experience designing optical harnesses or cassettes for a manufacturing line, including test coverage and yield
• DWDM / campus DCI for cluster-to-cluster or building-to-building connectivity
• Familiarity with CPO/NPO, linear-drive optics and next-gen packaging
• Time at a high-velocity AI cloud, GPU cloud or custom-compute hardware team

Before you apply

• Must be willing to travel to manufacturing and datacenter sites
• Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed

About the company

SpaceX was founded to make life multiplanetary. SpaceXSI builds Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe, including the Colossus supercomputers and Grok models.