PIC Design Engineer

About Quandela: Quandela is a European deeptech scale-up building modular, scalable and energy-efficient photonic quantum computers. With more than 140 people, we develop our own hardware technologies — from single-photon sources to photonic integrated circuits (PICs) — and make them accessible via cloud and on-premise systems. At the core of our processors are Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs): compact optical chips that route and manipulate single photons to perform quantum operations at scale. About this position: You will join the Integrated Photonics team in Massy, composed of senior engineers, PhDs, and research interns working across design, characterization, and packaging of our PICs. The team owns the full design cycle of our photonic circuits — from simulation and layout to foundry collaboration and performance feedback. Fabrication is outsourced, but simulation depth, architectural choices, and design-for-manufacturing decisions are fully internal . You will design and optimize key building blocks of our PIC platform, translating system requirements into robust and manufacturable layouts that support the evolution of our processors. Working closely with characterization, you will iteratively refine your designs based on fabrication variability and experimental feedback. The coming year is strongly design-driven, with a focus on improving robustness against fabrication variability, increasing integration density, and preparing architectural evolutions for future scalable quantum processors . Why this role matters: What you design today directly shapes the scalability, stability, and performance of tomorrow’s photonic quantum processors. Your work directly impacts how efficiently our circuits scale, how resilient they remain under fabrication variability, and how quickly research concepts become reliable hardware. As Quandela grows, this role helps shape not only components, but also the design methodologies and standard s that will support larger-scale and fault-tolerant quantum architectures. Requirements What will you do? Design and simulate photonic components • Perform electromagnetic and thermal simulations ( Lumerical required ; Tidy3D or similar is a plus) • Analyze trade-offs between loss, footprint, fabrication tolerance, and performance • Design and optimize waveguides, interferometers, beam splitters, phase shifters, and reconfigurable elements • Contribute to next-generation components, including high-speed and new-material integrations Translate simulations into manufacturable layouts • Generate mask layouts using GDS-based tools • Prepare designs for tape-out with external foundries • Ensure designs remain compatible with real fabrication constraints Collaborate with characterization • Analyze measured data against simulations and identify performance gaps • Refine models and layouts based on fabrication and experimental feedback • Contribute to continuous performance improvements …