Staff Embedded Software Engineer, Lightmatter

Lasers

Salary not provided

Offers Equity grants (applicable to full-time employees)

Python

Linux

C++

Senior and Expert level

Toronto

Light-powered AI computing

Be an early applicant

Light-powered AI computing

201-500 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceManufacturingDeep TechMachine LearningScience

Be an early applicant

Salary not provided

Offers Equity grants (applicable to full-time employees)

Python

Linux

C++

Senior and Expert level

Toronto

201-500 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceManufacturingDeep TechMachine LearningScience

Company mission

Lightmatter's mission is to build an engine that will power discoveries, drive progress, and redefine what computers and human beings are capable of.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

BS and 8+ years of experience, or MS and 6+ years of experience
Industry experience with device driver and kernel side development
Strong understanding of hardware-software integration
Practical knowledge of communication and control in embedded systems, peripherals, and buses
Experience with developing commercial/enterprise-level software and firmware on Linux
If you're passionate about tackling complex challenges, making an impact, and being an expert in your craft, join our team of brilliant scientists, engineers, and accomplished industry leaders
Candidates should have capacity to comply with the federally mandated requirements of U.S. export control laws

Desirable

Proficiency with Python or C++
Experience developing firmware for photonic transceivers or similar systems
Experience with environments such as OpenBMC and DMTF

What the job involves

We are hiring a talented software engineer to help us build the next generation of photonic AI processors and interconnects
In this role, you will be responsible for developing and extending the device software and firmware stack for Photonic Compute and Photonic interconnect products. You will collaborate with other software teams and hardware systems teams to develop security, telemetry, virtualization, and remote administration functionality
Collaborate across a multidisciplinary team including Photonic, Analog, Digital, Systems and Network experts to define control plane architecture for Lightmatter's photonic interconnect products
Define diagnostics and monitoring architecture for photonic transceivers
Integrate with DataCenter administration capabilities using environments such as OpenBMC and DMTF
Participate in customer engagements to gather requirements and usability criteria

Our take

Neural networks and CPUs are vital to AI solutions, but manufacturers have largely failed to maintain innovation in recent years. Lightmatter solves this problem by offering a next-generation computing platform powered by photonics (light waves).

Lightmatter offers a forward-facing platform for AI-building that acts as an alternative to traditional solutions. It works by replacing wired CPUs with a combination of photonics and new algorithms. Lightmatter's solution is not only faster, but it is considerably more sustainable, and it has the potential to drive the next generation of AI development.

As of 2025, Lightmatter has raised $850 million across six funding rounds and grown to a staggering valuation of $4.4 billion, a testament to growing industry demand for faster, more effective AI-building solutions. Lightmatter currently has three products on the market - Envise, Passage, and Idiom - and is poised to take on the incumbent chiplet industry with a photonics-based alternative.

Steph

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

Glassdoor (4.2)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)

Oct 2024

$400m

SERIES D

Dec 2023

$155m

SERIES C

Total funding: $822m

Company benefits

Commuter benefit
Happy hour -Spend time together and build friendships
Generous vacation policy and holidays
401(K)
Opportunity to learn from your peers and teach them what you know across electronics, photonics, machine learning, and more

Company HQ

Old Mountain View, Mountain View, CA

Leadership

Nicholas Harris

(CEO & Co-Founder)

Previously worked as an R&D Product Engineer at Micron Technology, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

Thomas Graham

(Co-Founder)

Was an M&A Analyst at Morgan Stanley, and worked as an Agency Business Development Manager at Google.

Darius Bunandar

(Chief Scientist & Co-Founder)

Worked as a Research Collaborator at Caltech, and was a PhD Candidate at MIT.

Salary benchmarks

We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.

Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.

Share this job

View 9 more jobs at Lightmatter