Software Engineer, Automated Calibration (Quantum)

Silicon Quantum Computing; Sydney; On-site; AUD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) is hiring software engineers into Automated Calibration Services, the team that keeps qubits inside spec while programs are running. Physicists design the calibration protocols; you will build the software that monitors, automates and drives them, triggered by a schedule, a compiler request, or a monitoring event.

The device drifts. A calibration valid an hour ago may not hold, and the machine cannot be taken out of service for long.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building production software, ideally where the software drives physical hardware.
• Strong Python, including the scientific stack (NumPy, SciPy, pandas), plus a systems language such as Rust or C++.
• Workflow orchestration and DAG scheduling: ordering, failure handling and partial re-runs.
• Numerical work in practice: curve fitting, parameter estimation, optimisation, and knowing when a fit is not to be believed.
• Time series and signal data, including the basics of filtering and characterising noise.
• Working with instruments or devices that are stateful, slow, and sometimes unavailable.
• Data provenance and reproducibility: inputs, versions and device state.
• Observability, and measuring a system that runs unattended.
• Reading a protocol written by a scientist and turning it into code.
• Git workflow, code review, CI, and testing code that depends on hardware.
• Clear technical writing.

Responsibilities

• Build the orchestration that runs calibration protocols: the dependency graph, ordering, scheduling, retries and the decision to run at all.
• Implement the protocols the physicists hand over as automated, monitored, repeatable software routines.
• Build and run the realtime calibration service, and drive the FPGA calibration engine in the mesh.
• Own the calibration store: results, provenance, versioning, and the queries the rest of the stack depends on.
• Build the drift characterisation and qubit health analytics that decide when a routine needs to run again.
• Support every trigger path: scheduled, compiler-requested, and monitoring-driven.
• Work with Control & Error Correction so calibration fits inside execution duty cycles instead of interrupting them.
• Publish the device state, noise models and duty cycles that Compiler Services compiles against.
• Instrument the whole path so a calibration run is reproducible, explainable, and attributable to a device and a protocol version.
• Analyse device data to separate drift from measurement noise, and to establish whether a routine improved the qubit.
• Turn what physicists know into software they no longer have to run by hand, and keep them in the loop on what it does.
• Document the protocols as implemented, the dependency model and the operational procedures.

Skills

Python

NumPy

SciPy

pandas

Rust

C++

Workflow orchestration

DAG scheduling

Time series data

Data provenance

Observability

Git & CI

Technical writing

Tools

QCoDeS

Labber

pyvisa

SCPI

FPGA

HDL

Job description

Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) is hiring software engineers into Automated Calibration Services, the team that keeps qubits inside spec while programs are running. Physicists design the calibration protocols; you will build the software that monitors, automates and drives them, triggered by a schedule, a compiler request, or a monitoring event.

The device drifts. A calibration valid an hour ago may not hold, and the machine cannot be taken out of service for long.