Optical Engineer

About the Team

The Seeker Team builds the eyes and the targeting logic of our weapon system: a low-cost, mass-producible, multimodal missile seeker that leans on commercial supply chains where they outperform, and vertically integrates wherever possible. On a modern missile, the seeker is 40 to 60% of unit cost and often drives overly long delivery cycles; accordingly, the seeker team is at the tip of the spear for delivering capability to our customers and value to the taxpayer.

Seeker design has exactly two real constraints: physics and mission. Nothing else is a show-stopper, only an obstacle to overcome. We are a small, deeply technical team that drives capability through ingenuity and bias for action and ships hardware that flies. This is a wear-many-hats environment where you must be comfortable "building the airplane in flight" and stepping well outside your comfort zone; a narrowly scoped role with clean handoffs is not what this team offers.

This is an AI-native team. Through fluent use of cutting-edge agentic coding tools, one engineer here consistently out-delivers a much larger conventional team. You will have opinions about where these tools help and where they do not, provide governance input, and build out an AI-centric workflow from day one.

About the Role

You will work with the other seeker team engineers to design, build, align, and test the optical assemblies and laser-based subsystems of our seeker, taking concepts from initial ray trace and breadboard setups at the optical bench through flight-ready hardware. Your day-to-day work spans general optical engineering across both passive and active paths: laying out lenses, prisms, mirrors, filters, and beam-steering optics; characterizing laser sources, avalanche photodiodes (APDs), and array detectors; and closing radiometric and optical link budgets against real hardware measurements. This is a hands-on individual contributor role in the lab where you report to the Seeker Lead and work side by side with the opto-mechanical, laser, and electronics engineers to build and prove optical hardware that flies.

What You'll Do

Design, build, and align free-space and fiber-coupled benchtop optical setups using lenses, mirrors, prisms, beamsplitters, filters, and beam-steering elements.
Build and maintain radiometric and optical link budgets from source to detector, reconciling models against bench and field data.
Identify, measure, and mitigate optical and detector noise sources across the signal chain, including background radiance, stray light, scatter, speckle, shot noise, and readout noise.
Perform optical layout and basic lens design in Zemax for transmit, receive, and test-bench paths.
Characterize and integrate pulsed and CW laser sources into optical assemblies, measuring energy, pulse shape, beam quality, divergence, wavelength stability, and jitter over temperature.
Evaluate, characterize, and integrate APDs, PIN photodiodes, and array detectors, verifying responsivity, NEP, bandwidth, linearity, and timing at the bench.
Partner with the opto-mechanical and integration engineers to transition breadboard layouts into rugged brassboard and flight assemblies, supporting boresight, focus, and environmental test.
Maintain safe, disciplined laser operations in the lab and on the test range through practical hazard controls, beam containment, and safe alignment habits.
Work with the electronics and algorithm engineers to deliver calibrated optical measurements and realistic sensor error models into the seeker pipeline.

Skills We're Hiring For

B.S. in Optical Engineering, Photonics, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or related; M.S. or Ph.D. preferred.
5+ years of hands-on optical engineering experience building and testing electro-optical systems, laser subassemblies, or precision optical instruments.
Strong benchtop optics craft: alignment and metrology with lenses, mirrors, prisms, polarizers, filters, beam-steering devices, and fiber/free-space optics.
Radiometry and optical link budget analysis from first principles.
Practical understanding of optical and detector noise sources (background light, scatter, speckle, shot noise, dark current, thermal/electronic noise) and how they limit sensitivity.
Hands-on experience with APDs and array detectors, including characterization, biasing/readout considerations, and SNR tradeoffs.
Working familiarity with pulsed and/or CW lasers and standard characterization measurements: power/energy, pulse timing, beam profiling, divergence, and spectrum.
Zemax (OpticStudio) proficiency for lens design, ray tracing, and optical layout.
Practical laser safety knowledge for everyday lab and range work: hazard awareness, beam containment, and safe alignment.
Proficiency in Python or similar for instrument interface and bench data analysis.

Bonus Points For

Hands-on experience with thermal imaging systems and infrared cameras (MWIR/LWIR).
Hands-on experience with benchtop electronics (detector biasing, transimpedance amplifiers, laser trigger/drive interfaces), brassboard prototyping, or full OEM packaging of optical systems.
Optical tolerancing and stray-light analysis (Zemax non-sequential, FRED, ASAP, or TracePro).
Optics lab automation: scripting instrument control, automated alignment or test stages, and repeatable characterization pipelines.
Experience with flight, airborne, or munition-class optical hardware built for shock, vibration, and thermal extremes.
Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar) to accelerate modeling, analysis, and lab tooling.