Laser Lead — High-Energy Laser System

About Tachyon

Accelerators sit at the center of some of humanity's most important industries. They are used to test spacecraft electronics, manufacture medical isotopes, inspect critical infrastructure, advance fusion research, probe new materials, and explore fundamental physics. Yet despite their importance, accelerator technology has remained largely confined to national laboratories, universities, and bespoke (but enormous) government programs. Tachyon Industrial was founded to change that.

We are building a High Energy Physics Prime, the first venture-scale industrial accelerator company: a vertically integrated business focused on designing, manufacturing, and operating the next generation of particle accelerator infrastructure.

The Role

We're looking for a senior laser scientist or engineer to design, build, field, and characterize the core of our laser system: a sub-picosecond, kW-class average power, PW-class peak power laser with high pulse contrast — pulse energies in the 10s to 100s of Joules, repetition rates in the Hz–kHz range — built to industrial standards of reliability and performance in a robust, compact architecture. This is orders of magnitude more capable than any comparable system built to date.

This is a lead role, not a staff-scientist seat. You'll set the architecture, manage the vendors and collaborators actually building major subsystems, and do hands-on bench work yourself when that's what the week needs. This role is foundational for our frontier laser-plasma accelerator platform that opens the door to some of the most ambitious physics programs in the field today.

What you'll do

• Design and specify the laser system: sub-picosecond pulse duration, kW-class average power, PW-class peak power, high pulse contrast, pulse energies in the 10s to 100s of Joules, Hz–kHz repetition rate. The gain medium, wavelength, and amplifier architecture are open — the right candidate will help determine which combination best meets the performance, reliability, and compactness requirements, rather than inheriting a fixed design
• Engineer around bandwidth- and duration-limiting effects in high-energy amplifier chains (e.g., gain narrowing) that can cap achievable pulse duration independent of front-end seed bandwidth — a real, recurring challenge in this class of system that the right candidate will already recognize
• Architect for industrial reliability and duty-cycle performance, not just peak demonstrated physics performance — a robust, compact system that runs repeatably under real operating conditions, not a one-shot laboratory record
• Own closed-loop wavefront correction and focusability engineering
• Run technical engagement and down-select across a landscape of industry vendors and national laboratories developing relevant high-energy laser technology
• Take the system from optical-table physics to a ruggedized, compact, industrial-grade package, and build the laser team as the program scales
• Work with our founders and executives to ensure that the laser system meets the company’s strategic goals.

What we're looking for

• Ambition: You want to build the most capable high-average-power PW-class CPA system that can actually run under real operating conditions, not just demonstrate a single hero shot.
• High competence: You are comfortable working at every level, from architecture trade studies to hands-on bench alignment, in a startup, fast-iteration environment.
• Creativity: You find solutions that create leverage, increasing performance, reducing costs, or contracting timelines in meaningful ways.
• High agency: You can hold vendors to a technical spec, evaluate a vendor's simulation or performance data critically enough to catch subtle limiting effects (e.g., bandwidth narrowing under amplification) before they become a program risk.
• Breadth: You interact well with the broader physics picture (target physics, accelerator requirements) driving the laser requirements, rather than treating the laser as an isolated deliverable.
• Leadership paired with grit: You know you can’t get far alone and want to build the top notch team to execute. But you roll up your sleeves and dig the hole alongside them when it’s time to do the work.
• Collaborative: You coordinate closely with the rest of the technical team and with external vendors and labs.
• Courage paired with judgment: You are willing to set an open architecture and own that call, while knowing when to test, measure, or bring in outside expertise.

Technical expertise you should have

• Multi-pass, high-energy solid-state amplifier chain design (Nd:glass, Yb-based, or other broadband gain media), including bandwidth/gain-narrowing management and inter-pass spectral shaping
• CPA / OPCPA laser systems; double-CPA architectures; stretcher/compressor design
• High-temporal-contrast techniques: OPA-based pulse cleaning, cross-correlator contrast diagnostics, ASE and pre-pulse suppression
• Nonlinear optics, including contrast measurement and improvement techniques (e.g., third-order cross-correlation, XPW, low-gain OPA)
• Novel laser concepts: novel gain media, coherent beam combining, plasma optics
• Diode pumping of solid-state gain media and high-average-power thermal management
• Free-space optics; adaptive optics and closed-loop wavefront/beam control
• Simulation and design tools: Zemax, Miro, ASLD/SNLO-class nonlinear-optics codes, SolidWorks
• Experience taking a system from optical-table demonstration to a ruggedized, compact, industrial-grade package built for field reliability, not just laboratory demonstration
• Industrial-grade reliability engineering for laser systems — duty cycle, maintainability, environmental robustness — alongside peak-performance physics
• Laser control systems and LIDT (laser-induced damage threshold) engineering
• Track record coordinating with external vendors, national labs, and collaborators on a build — not just an internal R&D team

Why Tachyon

Talented experimental physicists today are offered few compelling visions for their work: join a megaproject and become a cog in a huge machine, work defense contracts at a sclerotic prime, or reskill as a machine-learning engineer. This role is none of those — it's ownership of a genuinely novel high-energy laser system, built for a program at the frontier of what's physically possible, with the latitude to set the architecture and the resources to build the team around it.