Hans-Christoph Eckstein
CTO & Co-founder at Stealth Mode Startup Company
San Francisco Bay Area, United States
About Hans-Christoph Eckstein
Hans-Christoph Eckstein is CTO & Co-founder at Stealth Mode Startup Company. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States.
Multidisciplinary engineering leader specializing in complex electro‑optical, compute, and embedded systems for next‑generation mobility, robotics, and photonic computing. I bring 20+ years of experience spanning integrated photonics, optical device design, semiconductor physics, high‑speed electronics, embedded platforms, and large‑scale hardware development across automotive, industrial, and research environments. My background combines deep technical expertise with organizational leadership at scale. I’ve built and led global teams of 100+ engineers across optics, electronics, sensing, and embedded systems, delivering products from early‑stage R&D through mass production. My work includes diffractive and refractive optics, micro‑optical fabrication, laser systems, HUD architectures, illumination systems, high‑speed data paths, and hardware‑software co‑design. Earlier in my career at Fraunhofer IOF, I led R&D in integrated photonics, micro‑optics, lithography, and wave‑optical simulation, developing custom modeling tools (FDTD, nonlinear optics, GPU‑accelerated solvers) and contributing to multiple patents in photonics and sensing. More recently, I’ve overseen complex hardware programs in EV/AV platforms, managing $50M+ budgets, supplier engagement, reliability engineering, DFx, and scaling hardware into production. I’m passionate about solving hard engineering problems at the intersection of photonics, compute hardware, and intelligent systems, and I thrive in environments where deep physics meets real‑world product execution.
Skills
Additional experience
Career transition
Career break
December 2025 – February 2026
Education
- PhD, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
- Master’s Degree, Friedrich Schiller University Jena