# Lead Optical Engineer (Austin, TX) at Exowatt

- Company: Exowatt
- What the company does: Exowatt is redefining energy for the AI era. Delivering clean, modular, and scalable power that meets the rising demand of AI infrastructure. Backed by a16z and Felicis.
- Company website: https://www.exowatt.com
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: Austin, TX
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-06-16
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/exowatt/e28989f0-9f2d-4a8a-a511-e4142d4bc5a6
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/exowatt-lead-optical-engineer-austin-tx/

## About the role

Design and optimize non-imaging concentrating optics — Fresnel primaries and secondary optical elements — to maximize flux transfer, uniformity, and intercept factor rather than image quality. Build an optical error budget that rolls slope error, tracking error, and alignment tolerances into an intercept-factor model, and validate it against hardware.

## What they're looking for

- Education & foundation
- Master's or PhD in Optical Engineering, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline, with a minimum of 3 years of industry experience, or equivalent work experience
- Hands-on experience with optical systems in a lab environment, including assembly, alignment, integration, and testing
- Core non-imaging design competencies
- Fluency in the language of concentration limits — étendue conservation, geometric concentration ratio, acceptance angle, and the concentration-acceptance product (CAP)
- Command of the edge-ray principle and tailored-optics design, optimizing for flux transfer over image quality, familiarity with Winston/Miñano/Benítez methods or simultaneous multiple surface (SMS) design is a strong plus

Tags: Engineering