Quantum Engineer (Ion Trap) - Member of Technical Staff

About the role

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.

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 (e.g., two-qubit gate fidelity, heating rate, time to a ready chain). 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.

About 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Benefits

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