Photonics AI Engineer - Fabrication-Aware Design - Santa, Clara CA

**About Xanadu:

Xanadu’s mission is to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.

At Xanadu, we are learners, innovators, researchers, collaborators and problem solvers. We are creating something that has never been built before. What we are doing is extremely hard, the classic moon shot. Few people in their life will be able to be a part of something like this, where if we are successful, the technologies we develop will solve some of the world’s most challenging problems, and literally change the world. And that is something to be excited about!

**Your role and responsibilities:
**We are looking for a Photonics AI Engineer to own fabrication-aware design on a fast-paced path-finding team at Xanadu. You will be the design team's authority on what the process does to a design: layer stacks, geometry translation from drawn to fabricated, tolerance budgets, material behaviour, and the failure modes that only appear at wafer scale.

Working closely with fabrication process engineering, you will turn what happens on the wafer into design insight. Much of this is a data problem at a scale that rewards automation, so we expect you to lean heavily on AI tooling.

You will:

• Bridge fabrication and design, translating process constraints into design language and design requirements into process language.
• Own the fabrication-aware layer of our design methodology: layer stacks, geometry translation, bias and CD targets, corner definitions, and design rules grounded in measured process capability.
• Keep process models calibrated against real wafer data, covering effects such as CD and edge bias, sidewall angle, etch depth, film non-uniformity, and lithographic rounding.
• Define tolerance and yield budgets, and assess design robustness against process variation.
• Contribute design requirements and test structures to fabrication experiments and DOEs.
• Turn inline metrology, wafer-level optical test, imaging analysis, and yield data into design changes, building AI tooling for that loop.
• Lead failure analysis, separating design error from process excursion.

At Xanadu, we primarily work with Python and its scientific ecosystem, GitHub, Docker, cloud compute, and agentic AI tools. Proficiency in these technologies is essential.

**Basic qualifications and experience:

• Fluency with modern AI tooling in your day-to-day work (coding agents, LLM-driven automation, or agentic pipelines), and a track record of building your own tools.
• Participated in multiple tapeouts with responsibility for fabrication-aware design decisions, DOE input, or post-silicon analysis.