Technical Programme Manager - Photonic Connector Productisation in Newport

An opportunity to join a category defining company in Optical interconnect. Genuine team ownership - shape how your function grows and performs. Work with Tier-1 customers from day one. Light Trace Photonics has developed the UPIC — a novel photonic connector that solves a fundamental bottleneck in optical interconnect: high-tolerance, scalable fibre attach to silicon photonic chips. Our proof-of-concept is complete, our 2-channel attach has been validated with high misalignment tolerance, and we are in active commercial conversations with major players in the industry. We are now moving from R&D to product. Our first market is pluggable transceivers, with a target pilot launch by end of Q4 2027. The same platform is the foundation for our entry into co-packaged optics (CPO) and, longer term, quantum. To deliver this transition, we are building an Engineering function from the ground up. The Technical Programme Manager will lead this function and will be the single biggest determinant of whether we hit pilot launch.

What you'll be doing

Today, our team is structured around R&D: senior R&D, packaging, integrated photonics, and mechanical engineers, supported by a CEO and one admin. Customers are increasingly asking for things our R&D team is not set up to deliver — reliability data, qualification evidence, manufacturable process flows, design-in support for their modules. The Engineering function bridges that gap. It takes R&D outputs and turns them into a certified, manufacturable, customer-ready product. The TPM owns that function end-to-end — building the team, owning the technical roadmap from prototype to pilot launch, and owning the partnerships with OSATs, foundries, and tooling vendors that make our packaging path real. This is a foundational hire. The person in this role will define how Light Trace Photonics ships product.

The main functions of the role include:

• Building the engineering team
• Hire and leading a team of engineers including applications engineer, testing engineer, process engineer, certification engineer, integrated photonics engineer, lab technician, and at least one additional engineer to be scoped with you.
• Define the operating model — how the team interfaces with R&D upstream and with operations / supply chain laterally.
• Set technical standards, documentation practices, and engineering rigor across the function.
• Partner and supply chain hand-offs, run technical workstreams.
• Own the technical relationships with our packaging and test tooling partners.
• Own the OSAT hand-off, including transferring our packaging process from internal lab to external manufacturing.
• Work with the (separate) foundry relationship, ensuring engineering requirements are reflected in fab planning.
• Lead the engagement with our external quality and certification partner to establish the certification path for pluggable launch.
• Customer-facing technical engagement & Cross functional ownership
• Be the senior technical face of Light Trace Photonics to our customers during design-in.
• Translate customer module-level requirements into engineering specifications.
• Own the delivery of customer-requested reliability and qualification data.
• Co-own the pilot launch timeline with the CEO and R&D.

What experience you'll need to apply

Essential:

• Productisation experience in a semiconductor, photonics, or advanced packaging context — you have personally taken a hardware product from a working prototype through to qualified, manufacturable product in a customer-shipping context. Pure R&D backgrounds, however senior, will not fit this role.
• OSAT and/or foundry hand-off experience — you have run a process transfer from an internal lab or pilot line to an external OSAT or fab, and you understand the technical, contractual, and timing realities of that transfer.
• Team-building experience — you have hired, led, and grown a technical team of 5+ engineers in a small-company or fast-growing-business-unit context. You know how to hire well, and you know how to set technical direction.
• Customer-facing technical credibility — you can sit in front of a customer's principal engineer and earn their confidence in our product and our team.
• Comfort with ambiguity and execution rigor in equal measure — this function does not exist today. You will be building the systems as you run them.

Strongly preferred

• Direct experience with optical interconnect, silicon photonics, fibre attach, or co-packaged optics.
• Experience qualifying products against telecom or hyperscale customer requirements.
• A network in the optical interconnect and photonic packaging community that you can draw on for hiring and partner introductions.

Nice-to-have

• Cryogenic or quantum-photonic packaging experience — relevant to our longer-term roadmap.
• Prior experience as the founding engineering or productisation leader at a venture-backed hardware startup.

What you'll get in return for your experience

The opportunity to build and lead the engineering function of a category-defining company in optical interconnect, now the industry is moving from pluggables to CPO. A direct, founding-team-level role with meaningful equity. Genuine ownership — you will define how this function looks. The CEO/CTO is not going to tell you how to run engineering; that is what we are hiring you for. A technically excellent team to build on — our R&D group is small, senior, and has already delivered the hardest part. Active relationships with most of the Tier-1 customers in the space from day one.

What’s next?

Apply to our recruitment Partner, Roy Bennett – Head of Science, Engineering & innovation at ADLIB by sending your CV to this advert below. You can also contact Roy by emailing him – if you would like to find out more.