FEC Design Engineer - New Grad (PhD or Masters)

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Research Scientist Engineer: FEC Design

Achieve your ideal career at the forefront of innovation with Ciena. We know the importance of life outside of work, which is why our employees enjoy unlimited paid time off and the freedom of working remotely. Ciena empowers our teams with competitive salaries and incentives, community volunteer programs, professional development resources, and support for our mental and physical health—all experienced within a diverse and inclusive culture. To put it simply, we’re a technology company driven by our humanity.

How You Will Contribute:

Ciena is a leading supplier of optical line and transmission equipment. Join a diverse science and engineering team that invents, designs, and verifies Ciena’s next coherent transceivers.

Reporting to Senior Director, Optical Engineering and as a member of the WaveLogic science team you will contribute by means your ideation, design, modelling and coding skills in communication theory, statistics, digital signal processing, forward error correction, optical physics and/or optical transmission & performance measurements. We provide a learning environment that enables rapid progression to contributing membership in the team.

Forward Error Correction Design Responsibilities

• Create and analyze forward error correction (FEC) designs for next-generation high-speed optical communication systems.
• Work closely with the Modem Signal Processing Team on the implementation of digital algorithms in Ciena products.

General Activities

• Analyze challenging problems in your areas of knowledge which would be a subset of: coding theory, statistics, signal processing, communications theory, control theory, high-speed algorithms, and optical physics.
• Create innovative solutions that can be implemented in CMOS.
• Model in MATLAB.
• Learn new mathematical areas.
• Don’t know optical physics?  No problem – you can learn it here!

Experience

• Ph.D. /Master's degree in Electric Engineering or Computer Science with a background in Coding theory/Statistics/ Mathematics and/or Digital Communications.
• Familiarity with different types of FEC such as LDPC, algebraic (RS, BCH, RM) and Polar codes would be an asset.
• C, C++ experience would be an asset.

Collaboration with stakeholders

• Interface and collaborate with DSP, hardware, firmware, electro-optic, systems, and measurements teams. 
• Provide feedback & suggestions on existing designs; contribute ideas to improve design procedures.
• Share expertise and best practices with adjacent teams.

Areas of Impact

• Key DSP technology to enable state-of-the-art coherent optical modem and DWDM systems.
• Verified models and supporting measurements that predict modem performance and define modem specifications, respectively.