Lead Biophotonics Scientist – Tissue Optics

Job Description

General Info

This position is on-site in Budapest and requires EU residency or an existing EU work visa.

We are building a computational imaging platform that recovers the physical optical properties of a scene — the illumination, the camera’s own response, and how real materials reflect and scatter light — from ordinary consumer camera capture. This is a difficult, high-impact engineering problem, and we are building the whole stack: capture, models, and the applications that run on them. The first keystone component is under provisional patent, with a broader patent family in progress.

This role owns the biological and optical science behind what we capture. Biological tissue is the most demanding class of material we work with, and understanding how light actually interacts with it — at the level of real biological structure rather than empirical curve fitting — is what lets us judge what is worth measuring and what our measurements mean. You will work closely with our Lead Imaging Scientist, who owns the imaging and reconstruction side of the platform; you own the tissue-optics side, and the two of you will work as a pair on the questions that sit between them. You will also work with the ML engineers and the capture systems engineers who build the pipeline. This is not a software engineering role, but you will be expected to express your science as measurable, testable requirements that engineers can build against.

Tasks

Tissue Optics & Spectral Science

• Act as the company’s authority on how light interacts with layered, scattering biological materials, and build and maintain the physical models that underpin that understanding.
• Establish what is and is not physically measurable in this domain, and set realistic, defensible expectations for what can be recovered from optical measurement.
• Define the measurement science: what ground truth we need, how it should be obtained, to what accuracy, and how it should be maintained over time.
• Design human-subject capture studies and see them through: protocol design, subject diversity across the full range of human variation relevant to the measurements, informed consent, ethics approval, and data governance.
• Evaluate and select the measurement instrumentation, reference materials, and phantoms used for tissue characterization work.
• Define the validation methodology and the error metrics that matter for each material class we work with, and validate results against independent physical measurement.
• Advise on the physical constraints and priors worth carrying into our models, working with the Lead Imaging Scientist and the ML team.
• Track the literature across biophotonics, biomedical optics, and spectral imaging, and keep our approach current with the state of the art.
• Contribute to patent filings, internal technical briefs, and the scientific record behind the platform.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• PhD in biophysics, biomedical optics or biophotonics, medical physics, optical engineering, or a closely related field. Exceptional candidates with equivalent demonstrated depth at Master’s level will also be considered.
• Ideally 5 or more years of research or applied experience in tissue optics, biomedical imaging, or hyperspectral imaging beyond the doctorate.
• Deep working knowledge of the optics of layered biological tissue: chromophore absorption spectra, layer structure and its effect on the measured signal, surface reflection, and bulk and subsurface scattering. Depth in more than one tissue type is a significant advantage.
• Hands-on experience with hyperspectral or multispectral imaging in the visible and near-infrared, ideally including SWIR: radiometric calibration, reflectance referencing, and the practical failure modes of real instruments.
• Experience with light transport modelling in turbid media — Monte Carlo methods, the diffusion approximation, Kubelka–Munk, or equivalent approaches.
• Fluency with spectral data analysis: unmixing, chemometrics such as PCA and PLS, and quantitative parameter estimation from reflectance spectra.
• Scientific programming in Python or MATLAB sufficient to prototype models, analyse your own data, and validate results independently.
• Fluent English, both written and spoken. Candidates must be eligible to work in Hungary.

Skills & Competencies

• The ability to translate biological and optical science into concrete, testable engineering requirements, and to defend those requirements when they are expensive.
• Rigour about measurement, calibration, and uncertainty. You distinguish clearly between what the data supports and what it merely suggests.
• Willingness to work alongside ML engineers on physically grounded models without either overclaiming for physics or dismissing what data-driven methods can do.
• Exceptional problem-solving ability and the judgement to know which unknowns are worth chasing and which can be parameterized and set aside.
• Comfort operating in a confidential, research-driven, fast-moving environment where requirements evolve quickly.
• The ability to explain physical reasoning clearly to engineers who are not physicists.
• High ownership, sharp attention to detail, and genuine curiosity about the problem.

Additional Preferred Experience

• Publication record in biomedical optics, biophotonics, or spectral analysis of biological materials.
• Experience with established clinical or industrial tissue measurement indices, and a clear view of where they break down.
• Familiarity with diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, spatial frequency domain imaging, OCT, or confocal and multiphoton microscopy.
• Experience designing human-subject imaging studies and obtaining ethics approval, including GDPR handling of biometric and health-adjacent data.
• Familiarity with camera spectral sensitivity characterization, CIE colorimetry, and metamerism.
• Experience fabricating or validating optical tissue phantoms.
• Experience in early-stage startup or R&D and innovation-lab environments, delivering novel work under ambiguity.
• Experience contributing to patent filings.

Compensation

In accordance with Hungary’s implementation of the EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970):

• Salary range: HUF 2,200,000 – HUF 3,100,000 gross per month, depending on experience and demonstrated scientific depth.
• Discretionary performance bonus, with details discussed with shortlisted candidates.

Compensation decisions are made on the basis of objective, gender-neutral criteria, including relevant experience, technical skills, scope of responsibility, and demonstrated performance. The Company does not request salary history during the recruitment process.