Senior/Principal Hardware Engineer – Mixed-Signal & Control Electronics (On-site)

About Polaris Electro-Optics Polaris Electro-Optics is a rapidly growing photonics company developing breakthrough optical interconnect technology for data centers, AI, and high-performance computing. Their proprietary FenGlass™ platform integrates ferroelectric nematic materials into silicon photonics, enabling faster, compact, and more energy-efficient solutions.

Located in San Diego and backed by substantial funding, Polaris is scaling to meet demand from hyperscale customers and transceiver suppliers. Role Summary We are looking for a Senior or Principal Hardware Engineer to own the mixed-signal, power, and control electronics supporting our next-generation optical interconnect platforms.

This is a highly hands-on role spanning PCB design, analog monitoring and control, power architecture, data-conversion interfaces, and hardware bring-up. The engineer will work closely with high-speed hardware, firmware, photonics, packaging, and systems teams to develop robust electrical control platforms for photonic devices, drivers, TIAs, heaters, monitor photodiodes, and power-management functions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and design mixed-signal control PCBs for optical interconnect hardware and lab evaluation systems.
• Design multi-channel DAC-based heater and bias-control circuitry.
• Design low-noise analog readout for monitor photodiodes, RSSI, temperature, voltage, and current sensing.
• Define and implement power sequencing, local regulation, protection, telemetry hardware, and fault monitoring.
• Select ADCs, DACs, regulators, level shifters, muxes, switches, protection devices, and related components.
• Define hardware interfaces for MCUs, drivers, TIAs, sensors, and photonic devices.
• Work closely with firmware engineers to define register maps, control interfaces, sequencing requirements, and telemetry behavior.
• Bring up and debug mixed-signal boards, including analog performance, power integrity, communication buses, and device interfaces.
• Support integration of MZM drivers, TIAs, and photonic devices.
• Create schematics, layouts, test plans, bring-up procedures, and production-ready documentation.

Qualifications

• Strong experience in mixed-signal PCB design and board bring-up.
• Experience designing low-noise analog measurement and control circuitry.
• Strong knowledge of ADC/DAC interfaces, temperature sensors, power-management circuits, and low-speed digital control interfaces.
• Experience with LDOs, DC-DC converters, power sequencing, current/voltage monitoring, and protection.
• Familiarity with SPI, I²C, UART, GPIO, and related board-level interfaces.
• Strong lab skills with oscilloscopes, DMMs, power supplies, logic analyzers, and related instrumentation.
• Comfortable debugging interactions across analog, digital, power, and device-control domains.
• Preferred Direct industry experience developing and bringing up optical transceiver modules for datacenter interconnect applications.
• Experience with photonic IC control, including MZM heaters and monitor photodiodes Ability to work across analog, digital, firmware, and system-level problems.