You will join a fast paced, tightly aligned team building, testing, and iterating cutting edge technology in a startup style environment. You will be expected to operate as an end-to-end problem solver, taking ownership of problems and driving them forward independently, while staying closely connected with the team. You will draw on both your own expertise and that of the team to rapidly identify problems, propose solutions, and prototype, test, and validate new ideas that expand our core technical capabilities. Your work will include designing and building robust optical circuits incorporating new types of elements. These include gain media, active positioning elements such as piezos and stepper motors, cavities, spectroscopy cells, photonic integrated circuits, and more. You will also develop robotic manufacturing techniques to place, align, and integrate these new components into scalable production workflows. You will build and benchmark real, usable optical systems such as laser lock circuits and laser sources, iterating quickly based on experimental results and feedback. In parallel, you will contribute to prototyping, validating, and debugging production processes, and work with users to ensure our solutions are practical, reliable, and genuinely delightful to use. If things go well, you will have the opportunity to join OpticsFoundry, ship advanced optical circuits to customers, and grow with the company as part of the core technical team.

We are looking for someone who is excited about growing a small startup into a successful company and who loves to creatively solve technical puzzles. You also should have:

• a recent PhD in experimental atomic, molecular and optical physics;
• good skills with optics, and some experience with electronics and control software;
• great team working and learning skills, enabling rapid adaptation to evolving project needs;
• initiative and good time management skills;
• good communication skills in oral and written English.

We offer a temporary employment contract for 38 hours per week for a period of 12 months. The preferred starting date is as soon as possible. The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 3,546 to € 5,538 (scale 10). This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile Researcher is applicable. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable.