AI Engineer – Optical Design
Role summary
Peak Nano is seeking an AI Engineer with a background in physics, EE, or applied math to join their Optics Business Unit. This role involves working closely with a Principal AI Engineer to design, implement, and experiment with agentic systems. Key responsibilities include running experiments to evaluate system components, building prototypes, diagnosing failures, and communicating findings to a technical team. As the system matures, the role will evolve to own the production architecture on AWS. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience building agentic or LLM-integrated systems, production-quality Python skills, and meaningful AWS experience. Familiarity with optical design concepts is preferred.
## Salary
### Full Time / Salary
### Macedonia, OH
### Job Number: 1000090
### Optics Business Unit
## Description
You’ll work directly alongside our Principal AI Engineer, who sets the technical direction for the system. Your job is to be an implementation and experimentation partner on the agentic system: the person who can take a research idea and turn it into a runnable experiment, interpret what the results mean, and help decide what to try next. As the system matures, the role will evolve toward owning the production architecture on AWS. The key responsibilities of the job are as follows:
- Design and run experiments to evaluate what works: tool structures, reasoning patterns, retrieval approaches, optimization integrations. Interpret what the results are telling you about the system’s design.
- Build fast, readable prototypes that are easy to modify and discard when an experiment doesn’t pan out.
- Work iteratively with the team to figure out what the right agentic architecture is, not just how to implement a predetermined one.
- Diagnose failures clearly, distinguishing engineering problems from prompt design problems from domain modeling problems.
- Communicate findings clearly to a technically deep team that includes optical scientists and engineers.
- Grow into ownership of the production architecture on AWS as the system matures.
The ideal candidate is an AI engineer with a physics, EE, or applied math background. Someone with genuine hands-on experience building agentic systems and a strong quantitative foundation to work productively alongside a team of optical scientists and engineers. You don’t need to be an optical designer; that expertise exists on the team. What matters is that you’re not intimidated by the domain, can engage with it meaningfully, and bring AI and agentic systems depth.
## Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in physics, EE, or applied math
- 5+ years’ post-education work experience
- Hands-on experience building agentic or LLM-integrated systems. You have debugged a broken tool loop, managed multi-turn state, and worked with at least one agentic framework (LangGraph, Strands Agents, Claude Agent, or similar)
- Production-quality Python. Not notebook Python, but code that handles errors, is testable, and can be read by someone else six months from now
- Meaningful AWS experience. You have built and operated real systems on AWS, understand core services (ECS, Lambda, S3, IAM, SQS, or related services), and have debugged things that broke in production
- A demonstrated ability to design informative experiments. You know the difference between an experiment that answers a question and one that just generates activity
- Comfort operating without a complete roadmap. You can make good decisions under ambiguity and know when to ask versus when to try
- US Citizenship
## Preferred Qualifications
- Master’s degree in physics, EE, or applied math
- Familiarity with optical design concepts or software (e.g., Zemax, Code V)
- Exposure to reinforcement learning concepts
- Experience with MATLAB or numerical computing workflows
- Background in advanced mathematics: optimization theory, numerical methods, linear algebra, or differential equations
To be considered for this opportunity, please send your resumé to jobs@peaknano.com with the Subject Line ‘AI Engineer – Optical Design’.
## About The Company
### Peak Nano
#### Founded in 2016
Peak is a US-based, AI-driven technology company that uses nanotechnology to solve macro-level global challenges. Our engineers and researchers are developing solutions for advanced optics, aerospace, life sciences, and other industrial solutions. We are the leader in applying artificial intelligence to design and optimize reusable polymers to make the world a safer and more sustainable place.