Photonics recruitment
for integrated optics teams.

A small field with long memory

Photonic integrated circuit design draws on optics and on semiconductor process knowledge at once. The community in the UK is small, and its members have usually worked in the same few research groups, foundries and start-ups. Reputation moves quickly within it, and a recruiter who does not understand the difference between a ring resonator and a Mach-Zehnder modulator will lose a candidate's attention within a sentence.

We have spent time learning the vocabulary and, more usefully, learning who has worked on what. That is what makes it possible to approach an engineer about a role with some knowledge of their past work. The first message to a candidate then refers to a real piece of their work, which tends to earn a reply.

A typical search

A start-up near Cambridge was developing a silicon photonics transceiver for data centre links. It had raised its first round, had two founders from academic backgrounds, and needed a photonic IC design engineer with real experience of foundry process design kits. Applications arrived from optics PhDs who had modelled devices in simulation but never taped one out.

Joel asked the founders what a candidate would have to have done to be credible on day one, and the answer was a completed multi-project wafer run. That narrowed the field to a short list of engineers, some in the UK and some in continental Europe who had worked with the same foundries.

One engineer was on a fixed-term post at a research institute and had been considering her next move for a while. She wanted a role where designs went into products, and she wanted to see how the company handled the gap between simulated and measured results. The founders showed her their measurements, including the ones that disagreed with their models. She took that as a good sign, joined, and had a layout submitted to the next shuttle run within the first few months.

Beyond design

A photonics company also needs people for packaging, test and characterisation, and the supply of those engineers is as thin as the supply of designers. We search for them with the same attention and often find them in adjacent compound semiconductor businesses, where engineers already handle fragile wafers and demanding assembly steps every day.