A

Amazon

Sells products online and rents cloud computing

Electro-Optical Test Architect

Full-TimePosted on 10/16/2026
$117.3k - $160k/yr+ Sign-on payments + Restricted stock units
Mid
Bachelor's, Master's, PhD
Redmond, WA, USA
In Person
Hardware EngineeringHardware Validation & Testing
Company Historically Provides H1B Sponsorship

About the job

Requirements
  • A bachelor's degree in engineering, physics, or equivalent.
  • Experience demonstrating problem solving and root cause analysis.
  • At least 4 years of industry experience in electro-optical or opto-mechanical systems development across full product life cycles, from concept to production.
  • Experience with lasers, detectors, modulators, optical fiber and devices, testing and characterization.
  • Experience with optical metrology for component and system test and qualification.
  • Direct experience running thermal cycling and/or thermal vacuum test profiles for high-precision optical or electro-mechanical systems.
  • Experience with end-to-end system-level testing in a manufacturing or production environment.
  • Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Responsibilities
  • Design, build, and qualify electro-mechanical optical test stations for manufacturing-line integration, supporting build, test, and volume production of optical intersatellite link systems.
  • Develop and execute end-to-end test architectures that simulate operational environments for electro-optical systems, validating performance across thermal cycling and thermal vacuum profiles.
  • Define and implement design validation test plans for optical and opto-mechanical assemblies, ensuring structural and optical stability under environmental stress.
  • Conduct optical metrology, including wavefront error, boresight alignment, radiometric calibration, and pointing accuracy during thermal transitions.
  • Leverage PCBA-level electrical knowledge to identify and diagnose board-level failures, including connector intermittencies, solder joint reliability issues, signal degradation, and power integrity anomalies that impact optical system performance.
  • Lead root cause analysis for opto-mechanical and electrical failures, including performance degradation, thermal drift, and structural anomalies identified during environmental stress testing and manufacturing screening.
  • Drive design corrective actions and feed findings back into hardware design, manufacturing processes, and test system improvements to increase first-pass yield.
  • Develop measurement processes and procedures for volume manufacturing and transfer them to the production team, ensuring repeatability and first-pass yield targets are met.
  • Write Python, MATLAB, and LabVIEW scripts to automate data acquisition, environmental control, instrument communication, and test data analysis.
  • Analyze complex test datasets to identify performance trends, correlate optical and electrical failures to root causes, and develop strategies for resolving technical problems in testing and manufacturing.
  • Develop new and improve existing optical measurement methods and test station architectures to increase automation, robustness, and throughput for industrialization-grade production.
Desired Qualifications
  • A master's degree or above in engineering, physics, or equivalent.
  • Experience leading and influencing a team or organization, or experience with general troubleshooting and debugging of hardware.
  • Experience leading technical initiatives and key deliverables.
  • Experience influencing senior leaders and stakeholders.
  • Experience with physical and geometric optics, Gaussian beam propagation, and detection.
  • Experience with precision electro-mechanical optical assemblies, actuators, and pointing mechanisms.
  • Proficiency with automated testing, system characterization, and manufacturing test automation using Python, MATLAB, and LabVIEW.
  • Experience with fiber optics components and handling optical fiber.
  • Knowledge and experience with precision optical components and systems.

About the company

Amazon runs the largest online store in the United States and rents cloud computing to businesses and governments through Amazon Web Services. AWS pioneered renting computing power over the internet, and Amazon built its own delivery network to get orders to customers quickly. Shoppers buy from Amazon and from independent sellers on its store, and Prime members pay a subscription for fast free shipping, streaming video and music, and other perks. AWS rents out computing power, storage, databases, and AI tools so companies can run software without owning servers, and Amazon also makes Kindle e-readers and Echo speakers with the Alexa assistant. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and it is based in Seattle, Washington.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Seattle, Washington

Founded

1994

Get referred to Amazon

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • AI drives growth: AWS's AI and custom-chip sales each more than doubled, passing $25 billion a year by June 2026.
  • Stock grants gained value: shares hit a record in August 2026, making Amazon the fifth company to reach $3 trillion.
  • Ads are a third engine beside stores and AWS: they grew 26% to $19.8 billion in the June 2026 quarter.

What critics are saying

  • AWS's lead is shrinking: in the June 2026 quarter, Google Cloud grew 82% and Microsoft's Azure 43%, versus AWS's 37%.
  • Job security has slipped: Amazon cut 30,000 corporate jobs in October 2025 and January 2026 to reduce management layers.
  • Expect five office days a week: Amazon ended its three-day hybrid policy for corporate staff in January 2025.

What makes Amazon unique

  • Most of Amazon's profit comes from cloud: AWS made 21% of sales but 60% of operating profit in mid-2026.
  • Amazon is America's biggest parcel carrier by volume: it handled 6.9 billion packages in 2025, more than the Postal Service.
  • Writing matters more than slides: Amazon meetings open with silent reading of a six-page memo instead of PowerPoint.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Flexible Work Hours
  • Company Equity

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

2%

1 year growth

2%

2 year growth

1%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 21st, 2026
Amazon to invest $18.1B in Germany by 2027 and back small modular nuclear reactor project

Amazon plans to invest €16 billion in Germany by 2027 to expand its AWS cloud infrastructure, AI, and logistics. The programme includes new AWS data centre capacity in several German regions and a robotics and AI research lab in Berlin. Amazon also signed a multi-party agreement with American Electric Power and X Energy to work on a small modular nuclear reactor project. Investors will watch how much of the planned 960MW Indiana nuclear output Amazon secures by contract. They will also look for German AI and cloud contract wins tied to the new capacity. The moves could ease energy constraints on AWS and support its $225 billion Trainium commitment.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 20th, 2026
Amazon's TorchNeuron lets PyTorch code run on Trainium chips, challenging Nvidia's CUDA lead

Amazon is introducing software that lets developers move existing code to its AI chips with minimal changes. The system, called TorchNeuron, lets PyTorch-based applications run on Amazon's Trainium chips after a single configuration adjustment. Amazon presented the tool at a developer conference in Silicon Valley and plans to release it free as an open-source project. The move challenges Nvidia, whose CUDA software has helped developers optimise AI workloads on its graphics processing units. Easier switching between chip platforms could give cloud customers more choice in computing infrastructure. Alphabet is also promoting its own AI processors as big tech firms look for alternatives to Nvidia. Nvidia, meanwhile, has introduced an Open Agent Safety Platform to help developers manage AI agents.

TechCrunch
Oct 20th, 2026
Google follows Amazon in challenging Nvidia's AI dominance with open-source TorchTPU

Google has released TorchTPU, its version of PyTorch, as an open-source project. The move follows Amazon's similar launch and challenges Nvidia's hold on AI app development, where most apps are written to run on Nvidia's chips. PyTorch is an open-source toolkit used to build, train, and run AI models. It is reportedly used by 85% of AI apps. Meta developed it in 2016, when Nvidia's GPUs were already the research standard. TorchTPU lets apps run on Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Google Cloud. Developers need only a simple configuration change, with no rewriting. Amazon released TorchNeuron on Monday for its Trainium chip and AWS. It is also submitting code to make PyTorch less tied to Nvidia hardware. Google says it worked with Meta, Hugging Face, Inferact, and RadixArk. It also launched a TPU agent suite to help developers migrate apps.

The Information
Oct 20th, 2026
Former AWS sales chief Mike Clayville rejoins Amazon as vice president under Peter DeSantis

Mike Clayville, a former Amazon Web Services enterprise sales chief, has rejoined Amazon as a vice president, six years after leaving for Stripe. He reports to Peter DeSantis, a senior Amazon executive. Clayville played a key role in expanding AWS's business with Fortune 500 firms during his earlier stint at the company.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 20th, 2026
Walmart embraces AI shopping agents as Amazon blocks them, Bank of America says

Walmart stands to gain if more shoppers hand purchases to AI agents, Bank of America analysts led by Christopher Nardone said in a note published Monday. They point to Walmart's integration with multiple AI ecosystems, its own shopping assistant, Sparky, and its partnership with Meta's Muse. Best Buy and Ulta also work with Muse. Amazon has blocked Muse from making purchases on its site and bars other companies from using automated shopping tools, likely to keep another tech platform from becoming a powerful middleman. Amazon may lose little in sales for now, since most people use AI tools to research rather than buy. Walmart is trying to get in early, while habits are still forming. Its management cannot say how popular shopping agents will become. Nardone noted it is also unclear what happens to advertising, a growing business for Walmart, if screenless computers do the checking out.