CTO / Chief Photonics Officer (Stealth Photonic Bio-sensing Venture)

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{
  "id": "2677923",
  "name": "CTO / Chief Photonics Officer (Stealth Photonic Bio-sensing Venture)",
  "office": "London",
  "keywords": [],
  "schedule": "full-time",
  "createdAt": "2026-06-18T10:53:18+00:00",
  "seniority": "experienced",
  "department": "Entrepreneurs-In-Residence",
  "occupation": "bio_engineering",
  "subcompany": "Merantix Fund Management GmbH",
  "employmentType": "permanent",
  "jobDescriptions": [
    {
      "name": "What we do",
      "value": "We are an early-stage deep-tech photonic bio-sensing company combining silicon photonics, micro-fluidics, and applied AI to bring high-end optical instrumentation out of the central lab and onto a low-cost disposable chip plus a compact reader. The first product is a point-of-care diagnostic targeting a multi-billion-dollar market currently served by hand-aligned, six-figure bench-top instruments.<br><br><strong>The mission</strong><br><br>£500K of benchtop optical instrument has to become a £5 disposable chip. The optics, the photonics, the detection, the entire signal path that today sits inside hand-aligned six-figure machines, has to live on a wafer that ships to a clinic and gets thrown away. Silicon photonics has finally reached the cost-volume curve where this is feasible, and AI design tools are finally good enough to do the multi-physics co-optimisation without an army of PhDs. The window is open. That collapse is the central technical bet of the company, and it is ours to own."
    },
    {
      "name": "Your role",
      "value": "You own the photonic and detection stack from architecture through foundry to a working integrated reader. You are the technical anchor who turns design intent into manufacturable, clinical-grade silicon, and ultimately the person who decides which physics gambits ship and which we leave for the next product.<br><br><strong>Responsibilities</strong><ul><li>Photonic and detection architecture for the disposable chip and reader.</li><li>Foundry execution: PIC, nano-optical, and microfluidic prototyping relationships; tapeout cadence; yield, robustness, and tolerance management.</li><li>The design loop: working alongside our automated multi-physics design engine; interrogating its output, catching unphysical behaviour, and driving design-arounds.</li><li>Reader integration: opto-mechanical, thermal, and electronics integration with the cartridge.</li><li>Risk register: what fails, how often, how we engineer it out for a device that has to be manufacturable at scale.</li><li>Hiring: your network is part of the value you bring for the first technical hires (micro-fluidics, hardware/firmware, instrumentation).</li></ul>London-based. Hybrid works well. Fully remote isn’t a fit at this stage, we need to be in the same room when it matters."
    },
    {
      "name": "Your profile",
      "value": "<ul><li>PhD in silicon photonics or EE, demonstrable experience taking PIC designs to working silicon.</li><li>Have personally taken multiple designs from layout to working silicon at a commercial photonics foundry.</li><li>Comfortable across photonic integration, photon-counting detection, and nano-optical component design.</li><li>Reads simulation and optimiser output as a co-pilot, not a black box.</li><li>Bonus: prior experience in scientific instrumentation, bio-photonics, or biomedical optical engineering.</li></ul><strong>Qualities we are looking for</strong><br><ul><li>Intellectually honest about uncertainty. Hardware is a humbling teacher. The right answer when you don’t know is “I don’t know”, followed by an experiment.</li><li>Comfortable being the deepest expert in the room. You will be the photonics authority for investors, partners, and the technical organisation we hire after you.</li><li>Sceptical of black-box AI on physics problems. You will work alongside an automated multi-physics design engine, treat its output as a smart collaborator that occasionally produces unphysical nonsense, not as oracle.</li><li>Bias to ship, not polish. First-silicon is rarely perfect. We learn from the chip we have, not the chip we wish we had.</li><li>Direct communication. Cofounder disagreements get aired and resolved on the day. We trade weeks for clarity.</li><li>Long-horizon patience. A six-figure instrument compressed onto a £5 chip is not a one year project. We are building for a decade.</li></ul>"
    },
    {
      "name": "What we offer",
      "value": "Founding team-level equity. Salary set at pre-seed close, calibrated to the round size and the role’s market reality at that point.<br><br><strong>Who you’d be working with</strong><br><br>Prathap, the founder. Repeat founder and AI expert, London-based. Software engineer by training, hardware startup founder by choice, pulled into life-sciences instrumentation because lab-on-a-chip is the wedge that puts cutting-edge diagnostics into the hands of the half of humanity that doesn’t have access to a teaching hospital. Built the multi-physics BO engine that produced the current tape-out candidate, drafted the priority patent specification, and owns GTM, funding, and the early organisation.<br><br>I’m not a silicon-photonics engineer. Fab, foundry, opto-mechanical integration, these are the parts of the device I can’t run myself, and I’m not planning to. They’re the parts you’d own end-to-end: architecture, foundry choice, tape-out cadence, the technical hires. I’d back your calls, not second-guess them.<br><br><strong>How we work? The bits that matter to a daily relationship</strong><br><ul><li>Done > perfect. A prototype on the bench is worth a thousand-slide deck.</li><li>Outcome > metrics > intuition. Metrics are how we navigate; outcomes are what we are navigating to; intuition is what we tolerate when neither is available.</li><li>A bad decision is better than no decision. Founding teams die of indecision more often than bad calls.</li><li>Over-communicate by default. Ambiguity within the founding team is the single biggest unforced error early.</li><li>Compassion and trust over performance incentives. Compensation gets people in the door; trust keeps them building.</li></ul>"
    }
  ],
  "occupationCategory": "engineering",
  "recruitingCategory": "Stealth Photonics Bio-sensing Venture"
}