Optical Application Engineer Jobs in Washington, DC

Field Application Engineer - Molex Optical Connectivity Group
Your Job
Molex Optical Connectivity Group is seeking a dynamic and proactive Field Application Engineer (FAE) to lead, promote, and resolve technical and engineering barriers in designing Molex optical connectivity solutions into hyperscale data center customers. This role will drive technical engagements in targeted growth areas, uncover new opportunities, and build strong relationships with customer engineering, architecture, and deployment teams. A key function of this role is to promote and secure new design wins for high-density optical connectivity solutions, including connectors, patch cords, trunks, panels, and related infrastructure deployed in hyperscale data centers.
Molex creates connections for life by enabling technologies that transform the future and improve lives. With a presence in more than 40 countries, Molex offers a complete range of connectivity products, services, and solutions for the data communications, medical, industrial, automotive, and consumer electronics industries. The Optical Connectivity Group supports customers in hyperscale cloud, AI infrastructure, datacenter, and high-performance networking environments.
What You Will Do
• Support customer engineering contacts and the Molex sales team to secure new design wins and a convertible Salesforce pipeline that leads to profitable year-over-year growth.
• Establish strategic and differentiated technical relationships with key engineering, system architecture, and deployment contacts at target hyperscale accounts.
• Provide innovative solutions to customer applications utilizing Molex optical connectivity products, along with the related connectors, patch cords, trunks, and panels that make up end-to-end infrastructure in hyperscale data centers.
• Support customer architecture and hardware teams on deployment of optical connectivity solutions within rack, row, and pod-level topologies, ensuring performance, density, and scalability targets are achieved.
• Work closely with customer development, manufacturing, process, and reliability teams to resolve technical issues associated with optical connectivity design-in, installation, and qualification.
• Work with customer engineers to define and validate optical infrastructure including trunks, patch cords, cassettes, connectors, and panels from switch and compute platforms to the broader fiber plant, including polarity, labeling, manageability, and capacity planning.
• Function as a technical advisor, offering insights and recommendations to optimize customer deployments and future architecture choices.
• Identify, diagnose, and resolve complex technical issues related to product integration, system fit, optical loss budgets, mechanical interfaces, serviceability, and deployment constraints.
• Work with internal engineering, product management, advanced development, and sales teams to escalate and resolve critical customer issues.
• Identify market and technology trends in hyperscale datacenter optical infrastructure and communicate internally to help shape roadmap priorities and differentiated solutions.
• Develop supporting documents, application notes, and customer-facing technical guidance.
• Share knowledge and collaborate with other Molex FAEs and cross-functional teams in the datacenter and hyperscale ecosystem.
• Assist Product Marketing with competitive insights, customer system feedback, and market requirement inputs.
Who You Are
Basic Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of relevant engineering experience within the electronics, datacenter, or optical connectivity industry.
• Experience directly interfacing with customers in a technical, application engineering, systems engineering, or field engineering role.
• Strong understanding of hyperscale datacenter architecture, networking, storage, compute, and optical infrastructure deployment models.
• Experience managing projects, dynamically prioritizing assignments, and working independently across multiple internal and external stakeholders.
What Puts You Ahead
• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience designing, qualifying, deploying, or supporting high-density connectivity or optical infrastructure solutions.
• Experience supporting or designing optical infrastructure for hyperscale data centers, including trunks, patching architectures, and panel systems.
• Knowledge of connector, cable assembly, and optical infrastructure design or manufacturing processes.
• Familiarity with datacenter topology planning, fiber routing, polarity schemes, and installation best practices.
• Experience working with hyperscale customer hardware, network architecture, or datacenter deployment teams.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Experience using Salesforce and SAP.
• CAD modeling or system/mechanical integration experience.
For this role, we anticipate paying $170,000- $190,000 per year. This role is eligible for variable pay, issued as a monetary bonus or in another form.
Hiring Philosophy
All Koch companies value diversity of thought, perspectives, aptitudes, experiences, and backgrounds. We are Military Ready and Second Chance employers. Learn more about our hiring philosophy here .
Who We Are
At Koch, employees are empowered to do what they do best to make life better. Learn how our business philosophy helps employees unleash their potential while creating value for themselves and the company.
Our Benefits
Our goal is for each employee, and their families, to live fulfilling and healthy lives. We provide essential resources and support to build and maintain physical, financial, and emotional strength - focusing on overall wellbeing so you can focus on what matters most. Our benefits plan includes - medical, dental, vision, flexible spending and health savings accounts, life insurance, ADD, disability, retirement, paid vacation/time off, educational assistance, and may also include infertility assistance, paid parental leave and adoption assistance. Specific eligibility criteria is set by the applicable Summary Plan Description, policy or guideline and benefits may vary by geographic region. If you have questions on what benefits apply to you, please speak to your recruiter.
Additionally, everyone has individual work and personal needs. We seek to enable the best work environment that helps you and the business work together to produce superior results.
Equal Opportunities
Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status. Except where prohibited by state law, some offers of employment are conditioned upon successfully passing a drug test. This employer uses E-Verify. Please click here for additional information. (For Illinois E-Verify information click here , aquí , or tu ).