Field Application Engineer
Salience Labs
Field Application Engineer
Salience Labs
Photonic tensor processing for AI workloads
The Role
You'll be the face of our technology in every room that matters, proving, not just pitching, that our switch is the answer. From presales qualification to live demos to design reviews, you own the client conversation end to end, at our office or theirs, hardware in hand. You build the test setups, run the demos, and dig into the failure analysis when something breaks, because credibility here is earned, not claimed. And everything you learn feeds straight back into product, engineering, and sales.
Responsibilities
Own every technical conversation with the client, covering qualification, demos, and design reviews, wherever their hardware lives
Show, live, exactly how our switch fits their setup
Build and run the test setups and demos that prove it
Debug on the spot when a demo doesn't go to plan
Drive failure analysis to root cause
Turn client feedback into sharp, actionable input for product, engineering, and sales
Be the technical thread running through the entire sales cycle
Command a room of senior engineers, then pivot to the executive suite, without missing a beat
What We're Looking For
You'll have experience in hardware, optics, or photonics
5 or more years in a customer facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer, Systems Engineer, or something similar
A solid grasp of high speed interfaces, system level architecture, and hardware bring up workflows
Sharp debugging instincts across optics, hardware, firmware, and software: you can chase complex, ambiguous problems in a live customer environment, not just a controlled demo
A proven track record of hands on work: test setups, live demos, failure analysis, not just slides
Experience owning presales technical conversations, and turning field feedback into product/engineering action
The presence to be trusted onsite, clear and credible with senior engineers and nontechnical business leaders alike, in the same day
Adaptable and pragmatic: startup energy
Additional Info
Travel: customers are mostly based in the Bay Area, with additional travel across the USA and occasional trips to the UK headquarters for key customer visits. Expect less than 20% travel beyond the Bay Area
Photonic tensor processing for AI workloads
Salience Labs designs and builds photonic-based processors to boost AI computing power while reducing energy use. Its main product is a massively parallel, ultra-high-throughput tensor processing chip that uses light for computation, aiming to overcome bottlenecks in data transfer and processing that limit traditional electronic AI chips. The chip, built with silicon photonics, enables faster AI workloads by performing tensor operations in the optical domain, improving bandwidth and efficiency for data centers. Compared with electronic AI hardware, Salience Labs focuses on photonics to deliver higher throughput and lower power per operation, targeting AI and data center customers with specialized chip design and manufacturing. The company’s goal is to enable scalable, energy-efficient infrastructure to support larger and more capable AI models and workloads.
Explore more opportunities at Salience Labs