The science and technology of light: lasers, lenses, fiber optics, cameras, and the light-based chips powering the internet and AI.
Top pay: highest pay, longest training
Optical Physicist: Studies how light behaves and invents new ways to bend, trap, slow down, or measure it. Typical pay $165k.
Laser Physicist: Designs and builds new kinds of lasers, from tiny chip lasers to giant ones used for fusion research. Typical pay $160k.
Ultrafast Laser Scientist: Uses flashes of light lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second to film electrons and molecules in motion. Typical pay $160k.
Optical Designer: Designs the lenses inside cameras, phones, telescopes, microscopes, and VR headsets. Typical pay $135k.
Photonics Engineer: Builds products that use light: fiber-optic links, sensors, laser systems, and displays. Typical pay $120k.
Silicon Photonics Engineer: Designs computer chips that move data with light instead of electricity, used in AI data centers and future computers. Typical pay $165k.
Lidar Scientist: Uses laser pulses to map the world in 3D, for self-driving cars, forests, glaciers, and archaeology. Typical pay $140k.
Adaptive Optics Scientist: Builds mirrors that change shape a thousand times a second to cancel out the twinkle of the atmosphere, for telescopes and eye doctors. Typical pay $145k.
EUV Lithography Scientist: Works on the extreme-ultraviolet light machines that print the world's most advanced computer chips. Typical pay $170k.
Biophotonics Scientist: Invents ways to use light to see inside the body, detect disease, and even control brain cells. Typical pay $130k.
Imaging Scientist: Makes cameras see better, from phone cameras to satellite and medical imaging systems. Typical pay $135k.
Infrared & Night-Vision Systems Scientist: Develops cameras and sensors that see heat instead of visible light, used in defense, firefighting, and space. Typical pay $140k.
Laser Communications Engineer: Designs laser links that beam internet data between satellites, aircraft, and ground stations. Typical pay $150k.
Mid pay: solid pay, degree or apprenticeship
Spectroscopist: Identifies what things are made of by reading the 'fingerprint' of the light they absorb or give off. Typical pay $95k.
Optical Thin-Film Coating Engineer: Designs microscopically thin layers that make lenses anti-glare, mirrors super-reflective, and sunglasses polarized. Typical pay $100k.
Optical Test Engineer: Measures whether lenses, lasers, and optical systems actually perform the way they were designed. Typical pay $100k.
Laser Applications Engineer: Figures out how lasers can cut, weld, mark, or 3D-print a customer's product. Typical pay $95k.
Color Scientist: Makes sure colors look right and consistent on screens, in movies, paints, and printed products. Typical pay $105k.
Laser Safety Officer: Keeps people from being blinded or burned by powerful lasers in labs, hospitals, and factories. Typical pay $90k.
Microscopy Core Facility Specialist: Runs a university's advanced microscopes and helps scientists capture images of cells, tissues, and materials. Typical pay $75k.
Photonics Technician: Builds, aligns, tests, and repairs laser and optical systems alongside engineers and scientists. Typical pay $64k.
Fiber Optic Technician: Installs and fuses together glass fibers thinner than a hair that carry the internet. Typical pay $70k.
Night Vision Device Technician: Builds, tests and repairs night-vision goggles that turn faint starlight into a bright picture for soldiers, pilots and rescuers. Typical pay $56k.
Starter: fastest way in
Precision Optician: Grinds and polishes glass into ultra-precise lenses, prisms, and telescope mirrors by machine and by hand. Typical pay $50k.
Dispensing Optician: Helps people choose eyeglasses and contact lenses and fits them so they see clearly. Typical pay $45k.
Ophthalmic Laboratory Technician: Cuts, shapes, and coats eyeglass lenses so they match a prescription exactly. Typical pay $41k.
Laser Cutting Machine Operator: Runs industrial lasers that cut and engrave metal, wood, plastic, and glass. Typical pay $47k.
Holographer: Records 3D images with lasers, making security holograms, art, and museum displays. Typical pay $50k.
Laser Show Technician: Designs and runs the laser beams at concerts, festivals, theme parks, and planetariums. Typical pay $52k.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.