Director, Datacenter System Architecture

Entangled Future; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

PsiQuantum in Palo Alto, CA, seeks a Director of Datacenter System Architecture to lead hardware-system design for a datacenter rack product. This remote-friendly, director-level role sits in the Hardware Engineering organization and reports on enterprise-scale architectures.

The ideal candidate drives specs from concept to prototype, oversees external partner and contract-manufacturer builds, and manages complex constraint requirements in high-density environments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years hardware systems engineering.
• 3+ years directing system architecture for a rack-mounted datacenter product that shipped.
• Took a system from specification through prototype and partner/contract-manufacturer build.
• Direct command of datacenter hardware constraints: rack budgets, airflow, power, density.
• Familiar with datacenter cabling and high-density front-panel port counts.

Skills

Hardware systems engineering

System architecture leadership

Rack-mounted datacenter products

Datacenter hardware constraints

Specification writing

High-density front-panel port design

Job description

Director, Datacenter System Architecture at PsiQuantum, Palo Alto, California, United States (remote). A director-level full time position in the Business Development team, listed under hardware engineering.

PsiQuantum's mission is to build the first useful quantum computers: machines capable of delivering the breakthroughs the field has long promised. Since our founding in 2016, our singular focus has been to build and deploy million-qubit, fault-tolerant quantum systems. Quantum computers harness the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that even the most advanced supercomputers or AI systems will never reach. Their impact will span energy, pharmaceuticals, finance, agriculture, transportation, materials, and other foundational industries. Our architecture and approach is based on silicon photonics. By leveraging the advanced semiconductor manufacturing industry, including partners like GlobalFoundries, we use the same high-volume processes that already produce billions of chips for telecom and consumer electronics. Photonics offers natural advantages for scale: photons don't feel heat, are immune to electromagnetic interference, and integrate with existing cryogenic cooling and standard fiber-optic infrastructure. That approach has since been tested at the highest level of scrutiny the U.S. government applies to emerging technology, and it has held up. In 2025, PsiQuantum closed a $1 billion funding round that valued the company at $7 billion. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a $100 million Letter of Intent under the CHIPS and Science Act, followed by a $125 million agreement with DARPA under Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, PsiQuantum's most valuable U.S. government agreement to date. This year, we also broke ground on our utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia, and continued building out our Chicago site. Victor Peng, our CEO, and co-founder Jeremy O'Brien, now Executive Chairman, lead a team and board that reflects how seriously the world is taking this build, joined this year by Intel's Lip-Bu Tan and Atomico's Niklas Zennström. PsiQuantum also develops the algorithms and software needed to make these systems co

Requirements

• 10+ years hardware systems engineering; 3+ directing system architecture for a rack-mounted networking or datacenter product that shipped.
• Direct command of datacenter hardware constraints: rack unit budgets, airflow, power delivery, front-panel density, serviceability, environmental standards.
• Took a system from specification through prototype and a partner or contract-manufacturer build.
• Familiar with datacenter cabling and the realities of high-density front-panel port counts.
• Writes specifications engineering teams can actually build against.
• Zone 1- Bay Area and NYC