Optical Coating Engineer

About the role

The Optical Coating Engineer will design and develop optical thin film coatings and manufacturing processes that meet customer specifications. This role involves collaborating with various teams to transfer knowledge, support system tests, and lead projects.

Responsibilities

• Design robust, cost-effective coating production processes using existing methods that meet customer specifications.
• Specify cleaning, material handling, storage procedures, and metrology methods to characterize coating performance within the coating process flow.
• Manage coating designs and process recipe portfolio.
• Transfer knowledge of new coating designs, processes, and product characteristics into manufacturing.
• Interface with Development and Optical Design teams to understand new coating fundamentals and processing requirements.
• Utilize in-house developed software to model system-level coating performance; transmission uniformity, polarization and retardance characteristics, coating thickness variation, and perform tolerancing studies and Monte Carlo simulations.
• Engage with Mechanical Design team to design and fabricate prototype and production optical element tooling, customized coating chamber hardware, and metrology tools.
• Provide engineering support to Division Engineering Technicians; define test activities, process set-up, hardware evaluation, measurements, and analysis of results.
• Aid Program Management to estimate costs, labor hours, and manage overall coating aspects of projects. Provide input for process and product transfer tollgates. Participate in weekly project meetings; customer and design review meetings; and work directly with customers.
• Support System Test team with customized coatings for test benches and other metrology applications.
• Utilize Design for Manufacturing principles to determine optimal manufacturing strategies and Manufacturing Engineering Excellence (MEE) practices to solve technical problems and formulate mechanistic understanding of coating processes.
• Lead projects and activities furthering coating technology and metrology capabilities, and document intellectual property via internal reports, invention disclosures, and patent applications.

Requirements

• B.S. degree (M.S. preferred) in Optical Science / Eng, Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Eng, Ceramic Eng, Mechanical Eng.
• 5+ years of optical coating design and manufacturing, ideally in the UV and visible wavelength ranges.
• Coating and optical design / modeling software experience - FilmStar, OptiLayer, WVASE, UniformityPro, Code V.
• Thin film characterization - spectrophotometer, ellipsometer, SEM, TEM, FTIR, SIMS, MIL spec testing.
• Electron beam, thermal evaporation, and ion-assisted deposition. High-vacuum practice; vacuum chamber operation, system control, and support equipment.
• Experience with optical substrate materials; optics handling, cleaning, and inspecting.
• Contamination control and cleanroom operations.
• Experienced specifying capital equipment configuration and acceptance testing.
• Programming (MATLAB, Python, MS Excel).
• Excellent mechanical ability. Experienced with mechanical design and fabrication techniques. Ability to read and interpret mechanical drawings and specifications.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Critical thinking to solve problems quickly and efficiently. Determine root cause by leveraging Statistical and Hypothesis Tree problem solving methodologies.
• Ability to interact within a team of multi-disciplinary engineers and at all levels of the organization (Production Technicians to Senior Leadership).