Staff Firmware Engineer

PsiQuantum; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

PsiQuantum is hiring a Staff Firmware Engineer to join the Engineering team in a remote-capable role based in Milpitas, California. This lead-level, full-time position operates within the Business Operations domain, driving firmware architecture for high-assurance quantum hardware.

The ideal candidate brings 10+ years of hands-on firmware development, strong C/C++, Python for controls, and experience with multi-product control-board architectures, RTOS, and Linux environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of hands-on firmware development and architecture experience leading to a commercial product.
• Experience architecting solutions for multiple products and/or sets of control boards.
• Expert level firmware development in C/C++.
• Intermediate or advanced Python for control and test interfaces.
• Familiarity with build systems, version control, and test driven development.
• Schematic review and hardware debugging tools and techniques.
• RTOS, bare metal, and Linux development experience.

Skills

C/C++ firmware

Python

Firmware architecture

Hardware debugging

RTOS

Linux development

Bare metal

Build systems

Version control

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/EE

Job description

Staff Firmware Engineer at PsiQuantum, Milpitas, California, United States (remote). A lead-level full time position in the Engineering team, listed under business operations.

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

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
• Minimum of 10 years hand-on firmware development and architecture experience leading to a successful commercial product.
• Experience architecting solutions for multiple products and/or sets of control boards.
• Expert level firmware development in C/C++.
• Intermediate or advanced Python for control and test interfaces.
• Familiarity with build systems, version control, and test driven development.
• Schematic review and hardware debugging tools and techniques.
• RTOS, bare metal, and linux development experience.