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

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. The mission is to transform a £500K benchtop optical instrument into a £5 disposable chip.

The optics, the photonics, the detection, and the entire signal path that today sits inside hand-aligned six-figure machines must 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.

Your role involves owning the photonic and detection stack from architecture through foundry to a working integrated reader. You will be 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.

• Photonic and detection architecture for the disposable chip and reader.
• Foundry execution: PIC, nano‑optical, and microfluidic prototyping relationships; tapeout cadence; yield, robustness, and tolerance management.
• The design loop: working alongside our automated multi‑physics design engine; interrogating its output, catching unphysical behaviour, and driving design‑arounds.
• Reader integration: opto‑mechanical, thermal, and electronics integration with the cartridge.
• Risk register: what fails, how often, how we engineer it out for a device that has to be manufacturable at scale.
• Hiring: your network is part of the value you bring for the first technical hires (micro‑fluidics, hardware/firmware, instrumentation).

Your profile includes a PhD in silicon photonics or EE, with demonstrable experience taking PIC designs to working silicon. You should have personally taken multiple designs from layout to working silicon at a commercial photonics foundry. You must be comfortable across photonic integration, photon‑counting detection, and nano‑optical component design. You should read simulation and optimiser output as a co‑pilot, not a black box. Bonus: prior experience in scientific instrumentation, bio‑photonics, or biomedical optical engineering.

Qualities we are looking for:

• Intellectually honest about uncertainty.
• Comfortable being the deepest expert in the room.
• Sceptical of black-box AI on physics problems.
• Bias to ship, not polish.
• Direct communication.
• Long‑horizon patience.

What we offer includes founding team‑level equity and a salary set at pre‑seed close, calibrated to the round size and the role’s market reality at that point.

You would be working with Prathap, the founder, who is a repeat founder and AI expert based in London. He is a software engineer by training and a 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 those who don’t have access to a teaching hospital.

How we work:

• Done > perfect.
• Outcome > metrics > intuition.
• A bad decision is better than no decision.
• Over‑communicate by default.
• Compassion and trust over performance incentives.