Principal Optical System Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical liaison for TE’s customers, actively engaging with hyperscalers, OEMs, and system architects to gain deep insights into next-gen compute, AI, storage, and networking challenges.
• Proactively identify and assess technology disruptors, translating emerging trends into strategic R&D initiatives and product development roadmaps to maintain TE’s industry leadership.
• Cultivate and strengthen customer partnerships, fostering co-development opportunities and collaborative innovation to accelerate next-gen infrastructure advancements.
• Drive thought leadership by educating and influencing internal and external stakeholders, from executives and product teams to key decision-makers in customer organizations, on emerging industry trends, TE’s technical capabilities, and high-value engineering solutions.
• Bridge the gap between customer needs and TE’s technology roadmap, ensuring TE delivers future-proof, scalable, and high-performance interconnect solutions tailored to the evolving datacenter landscape.
• Define high-level system architecture requirements, ensuring TE’s product roadmap is aligned with next-generation compute, AI, and networking ecosystems.
• Drive TE’s technology vision and strategy, ensuring our interconnect solutions support the evolving needs of standards like OSFP, QSFP-DD, COBO, and standards set by OIF and IEEE, particularly as they relate to AI/ML workloads and next-generation data center architectures.
• Lead the evaluation of high-speed electrical, optical, and hybrid interconnect solutions, balancing performance, power, latency, cost, and manufacturability.
• Collaborate with internal R&D, product development, and business units to shape product development roadmaps based on real-world customer challenges and market trends.
• Drive technical due diligence for potential partnerships, acquisitions, and ecosystem collaborations, ensuring TE stays at the forefront of innovation.
• Drive the design and system architecture of co-packaged optics (CPO) or near-packaged (NPO) solutions, integrating optical interconnects tightly with high-radix ASIC subsystems to enable ultra-high bandwidth and low-latency data transmission.
• Define novel, scalable CPO/NPO architectures to meet future performance, power, and density demands of AI, ML, and hyperscale workloads.
• Architect CPO/NPO systems across optical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical domains.
• Conduct end-to-end simulations and modeling to optimize signal integrity, power efficiency, and thermal performance.
• Evaluate emerging materials, photonic integration techniques, and semiconductor technologies to maintain a competitive advantage in CPO/NPO innovation.
• Represent TE in customer discussions and industry forums as a subject matter expert in co-packaged optics.
• Collaborate with hyperscalers, OEMs, and ecosystem partners to influence and align around roadmap development and optical interface standards.
• Partner with ASIC, package, board, and photonics engineering teams to ensure CPO/NPO solutions are manufacturable, scalable, and aligned with system architecture requirements.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, product management, sales, and marketing teams to translate technical insights into compelling product offerings.
• Drive the execution of high-impact, innovative technical projects, ensuring seamless alignment between customer needs, business goals, and engineering capabilities.
• Guide TE’s go-to-market strategy for new interconnect solutions, ensuring that our technical differentiation is clearly communicated and leveraged in competitive landscapes.

What Your Background Should Look Like

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Optical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Physics with 12+ years’ experience in the optical design.
• Technical expertise in high-speed optical engineering and design.
• Knowledge of compute, networking, AI / ML, and storage architectures.
• Experience in data center compute and/or networking industry system design and related technologies.
• Hands-on experience in the design and testing of optical transceivers and optical components.
• Si licon Photonics background is HIGHLY desired.
• Effectively able to build relationships with external customers and industry leaders as well as internally across all levels, disciplines, and geographies.
• Strategic minded with a proven ability to translate industry and technical trends into meaningful strategies for the business.
• A convincing communicator with compelling perspectives that drive engagement and excitement both up and down the organization, with an ability to clearly communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Demonstrates sound judgment in working through complex technical issues with an ability to communicate actions and impact clearly to stakeholders, including management, customers, and the technical community.
• Ability to spend 25%-50% of your time traveling domestically and internationally.

Compensation

Competitive base salary commensurate with experience: $154,100 – $231,100 (subject to change dependent on physical location)