Quantum Engineer (Neutral Atom) - Member of Technical Staff

About the role

You will work across the full neutral atom stack: from developing the calibration that makes a tweezer array 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

• Atom loading and array assembly: Optimize the routines that carry a system from first trapping to a defect-free array. Drive up loading, survival, and uniformity across sites, and cut the time it takes to reach a filled array.
• Qubit control and characterization: Develop the imaging and readout calibration that holds fidelity steady as a system drifts. Push single-qubit and Rydberg two-qubit gates to the fidelity our partners need. Maintain a state preparation and measurement error budget where every contribution is attributable.
• 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. Develop the software that keeps a system stable and online. Keep the cooling, trapping, Rydberg, and Raman lasers locked without a human in the loop. Automate recovery when they drift or drop out.
• System performance and control stack: Diagnose drift, atom loss, and fidelity degradation, and define the monitoring and recovery a tweezer array needs to run unattended. Control array geometry and characterize per-site trap depth from software. Write or adapt control software for arbitrary waveform generators, direct digital synthesizers, field-programmable gate arrays, cameras, and real-time rearrangement hardware. Own the sequencing timeline, from first trapping through rearrangement, gates, and readout.
• 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:
  • Map the neutral atom calibration problem end to end, from first trapping through rearrangement, gates, and readout.
  • Define which parts a calibration platform should automate first, and in what order.
  • Sit with customers and partners to see where neutral atom control inefficiencies become bottlenecks for their productivity.
  • Pick the friction point that annoys you most and architect a solution.
  • Develop your first automated characterization and calibration loop that adjusts calibration parameters based on experimental results.
• 60 days:
  • Stand up automated control for a complete sub-pipeline, such as trapping through single-qubit operations, as the foundation for full trapping-to-gate automation.
  • Ship your first contribution to the automated calibration routines. Start with trap depth homogenization across sites, imaging and readout calibration, or Raman gate tuning.
  • Fix the friction point you found in your first month, and propose the highest leverage things the team can do in neutral atoms.
• 90 days:
  • Have at least one calibration improvement in production that has moved a key metric. State preparation and measurement fidelity, time to a defect-free array, and homogenized trap depths are examples of what we track.
  • Lead neutral atom operations at Conductor.
  • Drive the control and calibration roadmap, including which systems we bring onto the platform next.

Requirements

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

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.

Benefits

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