Photonics Test Automation Engineer

Salary Range: 160000 to 210000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Key Responsibilities

Architect Automated Test Stations

• Design and develop software architectures for automated optical, electrical, MEMS, and system-level test stations.

• Translate engineering test requirements into modular, maintainable, and reusable automation frameworks.

• Integrate laboratory instruments, motion systems, control electronics, DUT interfaces, and supporting hardware into unified test environments.

• Build systems that can evolve from early engineering benches into repeatable validation, qualification, and manufacturing test stations.

• Define station configuration, initialization, calibration, sequencing, error handling, and recovery strategies.

Develop Instrument Control & Hardware Interfaces

• Develop and maintain instrument drivers and abstraction layers for equipment such as tunable lasers, optical power meters, optical spectrum analyzers, detectors, polarization controllers, motion stages, environmental equipment, FPGA/ASIC boards, and MEMS control electronics.

• Interface with hardware using protocols such as VISA, SCPI, TCP/IP, USB, serial, GPIB, REST APIs, or vendor SDKs.

• Create reusable APIs that allow engineers to interact with complex instrumentation consistently and efficiently.

• Debug communication, synchronization, timing, and hardware/software integration issues across test stations.

Build Test Automation Frameworks

• Develop scalable automated test frameworks using Python, C++, LabVIEW/TestStand, or similar technologies.

• Implement test sequencing, parameterization, configuration management, automated calibration, limits checking, and result handling.

• Enable engineers to rapidly create and modify test cases without rebuilding station infrastructure.

• Automate repetitive and time-consuming validation workflows to improve throughput, repeatability, and test coverage.

• Develop tools and interfaces that make complex test stations accessible to optical, hardware, reliability, and validation engineers.

Own Data Acquisition & Test Infrastructure

• Build reliable data acquisition pipelines from instrument and DUT readout through structured storage, logging, and downstream analysis.

• Define schemas and metadata structures that preserve device, station, configuration, environmental, and test context.

• Ensure datasets are traceable and reproducible across devices, stations, software revisions, and experiments.

• Support visualization and engineering analysis workflows by providing clean, structured test outputs.

• Implement robust logging, diagnostics, exception handling, and station health monitoring.

Scale Test Systems

• Turn prototype engineering setups into reproducible, documented station platforms that can be deployed across multiple labs.

• Develop station software with scalability, maintainability, version control, and reproducibility in mind.

• Establish Git-based development workflows, code review, automated testing, release management, and documentation practices.

• Support deployment, commissioning, debugging, and maintenance of test stations.

• Partner with manufacturing and operations teams as test platforms move toward pilot and production environments.

Partner Across Engineering

• Work closely with optical characterization engineers to automate established measurement methodologies.

• Collaborate with photonics, MEMS, hardware, firmware, systems, reliability, and product validation engineers to understand test requirements.

• Translate experimental procedures into reliable automated workflows while preserving measurement integrity.

• Instrument test stations to support deeper debug modes, failure analysis, and engineering investigations.

• Provide feedback on testability and automation requirements as new hardware and products are developed.

Essential Skills & Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Physics, Mechatronics, or a related technical field.

• 5+ years of experience developing software for automated test equipment, laboratory instrumentation, semiconductor test, optical test, hardware validation, or hardware-in-the-loop systems.

• Strong software development skills in Python and/or C++, with Python strongly preferred.

• Demonstrated experience controlling physical instrumentation and hardware through software.

• Experience developing instrument drivers, hardware abstraction layers, automated test sequences, or station-control frameworks.

• Familiarity with interfaces and protocols such as VISA/PyVISA, SCPI, serial, TCP/IP, USB, GPIB, REST APIs, or vendor SDKs.

• Experience building data acquisition, logging, configuration, and structured test-result pipelines.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals including modular architecture, debugging, version control, testing, and documentation.

• Comfortable troubleshooting problems that cross software, instrumentation, electrical hardware, and physical test systems.

• Experience working directly with hardware engineers, scientists, or validation teams in a laboratory environment.

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Preferred Skills

• Experience automating optical or photonic test equipment, including tunable lasers, optical power meters, OSAs, photodetectors, polarization equipment, or similar instrumentation.

• Experience with silicon photonics, optical transceivers, MEMS, semiconductor devices, or electro-optical systems.

• Familiarity with motion control, FPGA/ASIC test boards, embedded systems, or electromechanical devices.

• Experience with LabVIEW, TestStand, pytest, or other test development frameworks.

• Experience scaling engineering test stations into qualification, pilot-line, or production environments.

• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD, automated software deployment, or infrastructure for managing multiple test stations.

• Experience designing systems for long-duration reliability testing or high-volume parametric data collection.

• Understanding of basic optical measurements and terminology sufficient to work effectively with photonics engineers.

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software development, debugging, documentation, and engineering workflows.