Founding Machine Learning Engineer

Company Description Photonium builds AI optical design software. We specialize in intelligent solutions across industries such as quantum technology, defense, aerospace, automotive, life sciences, consumer electronics, semiconductors, and manufacturing, where manually designing optical hardware is a major bottleneck. Photonium is backed by Y Combinator (P25) and part of the NVIDIA inception program.Role Description This is a full-time role for a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, located in Manhattan, NYC. The Founding ML Engineer will develop the core of Photonium’s agentic and deep learning infrastructure. You’ll build models that iterate on optical configurations, use simulation tools as feedback environments, and implement optimization pipelines, evals, and reinforcement learning agents that continuously improve design outcomes. As one of our early technical hires, you’ll shape the foundation of our AI stack and work closely with the founding team (Harvard, Stanford, MIT), and network of optical consultants from Meta, Apple, and more.What you'll do •⁠ ⁠Build models to generate seed lens designs given constraints and specifications.•⁠ ⁠Develop RL pipelines that interface with simulation and optimization engines to extract metrics, refine designs, and complement real-world datasets with synthetic data.•⁠ ⁠Collaborate with top optical engineers and researchers to embed domain expertise, validate designs, and iterate on real client projects.What we're looking for •⁠ ⁠Strong experience in building and deploying ML pipelines/infra•⁠ ⁠Interest in optics and physics-based optimization•⁠ ⁠Familiarity with simulation tools is a plusContact: founders@photonium.aihttps://www.photoniumoptics.com