Quantum Application Scientist Team Lead

Qblox; Delft; On-site; EUR 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Qblox is seeking a Team Lead for Quantum Application Science based in Delft, Netherlands. This role focuses on acting as a strategic bridge between customers and the company's control technology, requiring leadership of a talented team of Quantum Application Scientists.

The ideal candidate should hold a Ph.D. in Physics with substantial hands-on experience in quantum computing and RF equipment. Strong communication and leadership skills are essential for effectively managing customer relationships and internal teams.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Physics focusing on superconducting or semiconductor qubits.
• Substantial hands-on experimental experience building and debugging RF setups.
• Demonstrated leadership managing technical teams, ensuring performance.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of Application Scientists in quantum applications.
• Act as a technical partner to Sales, translating complex concepts effectively.
• Synthesize customer feedback for actionable product input to R&D.

Skills

Leadership experience

Strong communication skills

Technical expertise in quantum computing

Multilingual proficiency

Education

Ph.D. in Physics

Ph.D. in quantum computing

Tools

RF signals equipment

Microwaves equipment

Cryostats

Quantum Processing Units (QPUs)

Job description

Your Mission:

We are seeking a Team Lead for Quantum Application Science to act as the strategic bridge between our customers' groundbreaking experiments and our cutting-edge control stack. If you combine a passion for quantum with a passion for people — this role is for you!

You will lead a team of talented Quantum Application Scientists, providing the clarity, structure, and coaching needed to help them thrive. By deeply understanding the problems our customers are striving to solve and serving as their ultimate advocate internally, you and your team will help them achieve transformative progress in quantum technology. Crucially, you will act as the connective tissue between departments, serving as a true partner to our R&D and Sales teams to align our scientific capabilities with market needs.

• Coach and Develop: Lead, mentor, and inspire a team of Application Scientists. Coaching and team development are top priorities. This means building individual development plans, having performance conversations, and creating career pathways for scientists, continuously raising the bar.
• Provide Clarity and Alignment: Bring structure to the team’s operations and align your team around shared company goals. You will set clear expectations, run a disciplined operating rhythm, and make sure everyone knows what good looks like — not just what to do next.
• Prioritize Relentlessly: Cut through the noise and help your team focus on what matters most. With customers pulling in multiple directions and R&D capacity always finite, your ability to triage, say no diplomatically, and protect your team’s bandwidth is as valuable as any technical skill you bring.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Act as a key technical partner to the Sales team — equipping the team with the language, materials, and confidence to position Qblox effectively. This includes leading or supporting high-stakes demos, contributing to competitive positioning, and helping the team qualify opportunities early so effort goes where it counts. You can explain a complex RF bottleneck to a salesperson and make them feel like they actually understood it.
• Be the Voice of the Customer: Work directly with advanced customers to understand their needs at a deep technical level. You will advocate for their requirements internally and ensure a seamless technical fit between the experiments they are running and our control stack. When you visit a customer site, they come away feeling they learned something — that is the bar.
• Own R&D feedback loop: Synthesize and prioritize customer feedback into structured, actionable product input — acting as a filter, not just a relay, between field signal and R&D roadmap decisions. When customer requests conflict, you resolve the ambiguity before it reaches R&D. When patterns emerge across accounts, you surface them as strategic signals rather than noise. This is not a passive information-passing role.

What you bring:

Technical skills:

• Ph.D. in Physics with a focus on superconducting or semiconductor qubits. Ideally you bring broad curiosity across multiple qubit modalities — customers do not always work on what you specialized in.
• Ph.D. in quantum computing is a must.
• Substantial hands-on experimental experience building and debugging setups with RF signals, microwaves, DC equipment, cryostats, QPUs, and auxiliary equipment. What matters is genuine lab credibility — customers will know immediately whether you have it. You have been in the lab long enough to know what breaks at 2am and why.

Competencies:

• Demonstrated leadership experience managing technical teams — not just mentoring junior researchers, but owning performance, navigating difficult team dynamics, and building an environment where PhDs actually want to be managed by you.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, capable of engaging both technical and non-technical audiences. You can translate a strategic roadmap for a scientist and a qubit coherence problem for a CFO without losing either of them.
• Strategic mindset with the ability to balance hands-on scientific credibility with commercial awareness. You understand that your team’s work is most impactful when it moves deals forward and builds customer trust simultaneously.
• Curiosity about the commercial side of deep tech — you don’t need to have run a sales cycle, but you are genuinely interested in how scientific work translates to customer outcomes and business impact. Early signals matter: customer-facing work, conference engagement, product feedback contributions. The commercial muscle can be developed; the drive to develop it cannot.
• Disciplined prioritization and the confidence to say no — you know that in a team with deep expertise and high demand, the biggest risk is spreading effort too thin. You make deliberate calls about where the team’s time goes, protect focus on highest-impact work, and push back constructively when the ask doesn’t move the needle.
• Multilingual proficiency is advantageous. High proficiency in English is a must.