Quantum Engineer (Ion Trap) – Member of Technical Staff

Conductor Quantum; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free healthcare

Dental and vision

Job summary

Conductor Quantum is building quantum superintelligence and a turn‑key trapped‑ion platform that researchers and AI agents can run with minimal human intervention.

You will own calibration automation, ion loading and cooling, and qubit control, while shaping system performance and the control stack.

Collaborate with physicists, ML engineers, and backend developers to deliver a stable, scalable hardware‑software pipeline that powers future quantum computing.

Qualifications

• High intelligence, high energy, and high integrity.
• Obsessive about the error budget.
• Hungry to change the world and tackle hard hardware challenges.

Responsibilities

• Ion loading and cooling: develop loading, cooling, and chain longevity; improve readiness time.
• Qubit control and characterization: push gates to high fidelity; calibrate and diagnose error sources.
• Calibration automation: encode tuning into software; close the loop with ML teams.
• System performance and control stack: develop stable online system; diagnose issues; build drivers for the stack.
• Collaboration and system integration: work with physicists, ML engineers, and backend developers to integrate hardware, software, data pipelines.
• First 30/60/90 days: learn calibration stack, develop end-to-end calibration sequence, and ship initial automated calibrations.

Skills

Ion trapping

Calibration

Quantum control

Tools

Arbitrary waveform generators

Direct digital synthesizers

FPGAs

Acousto-optic modulators

Job description

Conductor Quantum is building quantum superintelligence.

Quantum superintelligence is an AI that uses quantum computers to surpass the capabilities of humanity’s greatest minds. We are closer to that inflection point than most people realize. Frontier models are approaching general intelligence, and AI can already generate quantum circuits faster than humans can write them. The question is no longer whether quantum and AI converge; it is who builds the infrastructure to make that convergence reliable, scalable, and useful.

That infrastructure starts with the hardware. The biggest bottleneck in quantum computing today is not qubit count; it is the manual configuration that keeps those qubits from being usable. Our software automates calibration and operations across qubit platforms, turning raw hardware into a stable, ready-to-run platform accessible through a simple chat interface. By solving that bottleneck, we are enabling thousands, and eventually billions, of qubits to operate at scale.

The result is a quantum computer as easy to use as ChatGPT. The first billion users are coming. The majority, we believe, will be AI agents.

Why now

Today, AI generates production code faster and more reliably than most of the world’s software engineers. Code is math; math is an instruction set; an instruction set is a quantum circuit. AI is already generating quantum circuits. It just needs reliable hardware to run them on, well‑calibrated qubits to use, and a feedback loop tight enough to discover new algorithms autonomously.

The world’s most capable AI models are being pointed at B2B SaaS. We are pointing ours at the frontier of science.

Role overview

You will work across the full trapped ion stack: from developing the calibration that makes an ion trap run itself, all the way to hosting it online as a platform that human researchers and AI agents can build on. This is a high‑impact, high‑ownership role. You will define best practices, influence product strategy, and help lay the foundation for Conductor Quantum’s culture and growth.

Key responsibilities

Ion loading and cooling

Develop the routines that carry a system from an empty trap to a cold, ordered ion chain. Drive up loading reliability, Doppler and sideband cooling, and chain lifetime. Cut the time it takes to reach a chain that is ready to run.

Qubit control and characterization

Push single‑qubit and Mølmer‑Sørensen two‑qubit gates to the fidelity our partners need. Calibrate, benchmark, and know whether the remaining error is coming from motional heating, laser noise, or mode structure. Own shuttling fidelity where the system uses it, including the electrode waveforms that move ions without heating them.

Calibration automation

Encode expert tuning into software the platform runs on its own. Close the loop with the software and machine learning teams so calibration recovers without a physicist in the room.

System performance and control stack

Develop what keeps a system stable and online. Diagnose micromotion, mode drift, ion loss, and fidelity degradation, and define the monitoring and recovery a trapped ion system needs to run unattended. Write or adapt control software for acousto‑optic modulators, arbitrary waveform generators, direct digital synthesizers, field‑programmable gate arrays, and multichannel direct current voltage sources. Build the drivers and abstractions that let one control stack speak to many systems.

Collaboration and system integration

Work closely with physicists, machine learning engineers, and backend developers to integrate hardware, software, and data pipelines into a unified quantum control stack. Provide feedback on usability, stability, and performance from a hardware and systems perspective.

First 30 / 60 / 90 days

30 days

• Get fluent in the calibration software stack and understand how it maps to trapped ion hardware.
• Develop your first calibration sequence end to end, from ion loading to two‑qubit gate fidelity.
• Sit with customers and partners to see where the platform breaks down for them. Pick the friction point that annoys you most.

60 days

• Develop a full calibration cycle end to end, from an empty trap to two‑qubit gates.
• Ship your first contribution to the automated calibration routines. Start with cooling, single‑qubit gates, or Mølmer‑Sørensen two‑qubit gates.
• Fix the friction point you found in your first month, and propose the highest leverage things the team can do in trapped ions.

90 days

• Have at least one calibration improvement in production that has moved a key metric. Two‑qubit gate fidelity, heating rate, and time to a ready chain are examples of what we track.
• Lead trapped ion operations at Conductor.
• Drive the control and calibration roadmap, including which systems we bring onto the platform next and whether the control stack transfers between them.

The team

We are a small, passionate founding team of quantum physicists, hardware engineers, and machine learning experts. Our founders, Brandon and Joel, met each other at Oxford during their PhDs working on AI for quantum computing. There they saw first‑hand that calibration and control is a core bottleneck to scaling quantum computers.

This is your opportunity to do the best work of your life as part of that founding team.

Who we are looking for

High intelligence, high energy, and high integrity. Obsessive about where the error budget goes. Relish the challenge and chaos of real hardware. People who are hungry to change the world and do not need to be told what to do next.

Perks

• Free healthcare, dental, and vision
• Work on the most important technical problem of our generation