Intern, Firmware

Term: May - August 2027

Please note

• Position location is on-site in San Jose Office
• There is no immigration (except F1) or relocation support for this position
• Posting expires upon application threshold

Position Description

Ayar Labs, the global leader in optical I/O chiplets, is harnessing silicon photonics to revolutionize the scaling of AI compute hardware. Ayar Labs is shattering AI data bottlenecks by moving data at the speed of light. As pioneers of co-packaged optics (CPO), we are using light instead of electricity to move data faster, further, and with a fraction of the energy to fuel the explosive growth of AI models.

Backed by industry giants like NVIDIA, AMD and Intel and manufactured in partnership with the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystem, Ayar Labs’ co-packaged optics solution is key to unleashing next-generation AI scale-up architectures.

Our Platform Firmware team owns the firmware inside our multi-wavelength laser modules, our optical engines, and the management controllers that supervise them. This firmware is what stands between a subtle analog drift in a laser or a microring and a customer-visible failure in a datacenter, so it has to be exceptionally well tested, exceptionally reliable, and increasingly able to predict the hardware's own degradation rather than merely report it.

We are looking for a motivated intern to make real progress on this problem - through the telemetry that makes optical hardware observable, the DevOps and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure that keeps firmware quality measurable on every commit, the analysis that turns accumulated telemetry into early warning, or some combination of the three.

The work will be tailored to your experience and interests, and you will be mentored by a senior engineer as you work alongside Ayar Labs engineers to help drive the optical I/O revolution.

Intern Skillset Needed

• Working knowledge of C, C++ and Python, and comfort with Linux and git.
• Hands-on experience debugging real hardware, and the instinct to trust a measurement over an assumption.
• The ideal candidate is an independent and highly-motivated student who is able to work collaboratively and independently, and can self-manage time effectively to take projects to completion.
• Depth in one or more of the following, matched to the project the intern takes on:
• Embedded firmware: programming microcontrollers in C, bare-metal or on a small RTOS such as FreeRTOS or Zephyr, including peripheral drivers over I2C, I3C, SPI, UART, ADC, and timers.
• Lab instrumentation and test automation: oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, logic analyzers, and thermal chambers, with programmatic control over SCPI or VISA.
• Firmware DevOps: CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins), unit test frameworks for embedded code, static analysis, coverage instrumentation, and build and artifact versioning.
• Data analysis and anomaly detection: statistical analysis of large measurement datasets in Python (Pandas, NumPy, SciPy), time-series trend extraction, and threshold or model-based detection of drift.
• Closed-loop control and signal processing: PID and similar control loops, sampling and filtering, and reasoning about loop stability against real sensor noise.
• Prior experience with photonics is not required. A willingness to learn the physics behind the numbers is.

Education Requirements

Candidate should be actively pursuing a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

NOTE TO RECRUITERS

Principals only. We are not accepting resumes from recruiters for this position. Remuneration for recruiting activities is only applicable subject to a signed and executed agreement between the parties. Please don’t send candidates to Ayar Labs, and do not contact our managers.

Ayar Labs is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and is strongly committed to all policies which will afford equal opportunity employment to all qualified persons without regard to age, sex, national origin, race, color, ethnicity, creed, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. It is the policy of Ayar Labs to provide reasonable accommodation when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with a disability, unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. Veterans are more than welcome and encouraged to apply.