Senior Silicon Photonics Design Engineer

Nvidia

Ghent or Roskilde

This role lives at the electronic-photonic boundary - building the models and co-simulation flows that let photonic and high-speed electronic designs be verified together. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with circuit, system, and characterization engineers, and share in the team's collective ownership of a foundational capability.

What you'll be doing:

Develop and maintain the electro-optic co-simulation flow, integrating Verilog-A compact models with circuit and link simulation so photonics and electronics can be verified in one environment.
Define silicon-photonics test structures and characterization plans, and extracting compact-model parameters from measured optical, electrical, electro-optic, RF, and thermal data.
Build and calibrate compact/behavioral models for silicon photonic components - ring modulators and resonators, Mach-Zehnder modulators, photodetectors, grating/edge couplers, waveguides, splitters, and thermo-optic phase shifters.
Correlate models against foundry and in-house characterization data (spectra, S-parameters, OMA/ER), contributing to the model accuracy and validation the team is collectively responsible for.
Partner closely with circuit/SerDes designers, system teams, and foundry contacts as the direct customers of the team's models.
Contribute to the shared component library the team maintains - versioning, documentation, QA, and release - taking detailed physics/EM models as source data and abstracting them into design-usable form.

What we need to see:

MS and/or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Photonics/Optical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
Electronic-photonic co-simulation and Verilog-A compact modeling, integrating photonic models into a circuit design environment (Cadence ecosystem a plus).
5+ years of design experience in industry or applied R&D, spanning photonic and/or high-speed electronic design.
Proven track record in silicon photonics device modeling, compact modeling, or optical component design.
Photonic simulation tools: Lumerical (FDTD, MODE, INTERCONNECT, CHARGE) or comparable (Ansys, Synopsys OptoDesigner/RSoft).
Solid grasp of photonic device physics: resonator theory (CMT, Q, FSR, ER/OMA), carrier-based and thermo-optic modulation, waveguide loss and dispersion.
Experience building verification/testbench environments and correlating models to measurement.
Strong debugging and analytical skills, and a genuine desire to work as part of a close-knit team.