Senior Software Platform Engineer

PsiQuantum•Chicago, IL

14h

About The Position

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. In 2024, PsiQuantum announced government-funded projects to support the build-out of our first utility-scale quantum computers in Brisbane, Australia, and Chicago, Illinois. These initiatives reflect a growing recognition that quantum computing will be strategically and economically defining—and that now is the time to scale. PsiQuantum also develops the algorithms and software needed to make these systems commercially valuable. Our application, software, and industry teams work directly with leading Fortune 500 companies—including Lockheed Martin, Mercedes-Benz, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Mitsubishi Chemical—to prepare quantum solutions for real-world impact. Quantum computing is not an extension of classical computing. It represents a fundamental shift—and a path to mastering challenges that cannot be solved any other way. The potential is enormous, and we have a clear path to make it real. Come join us. Team Overview PsiQuantum's Applications Software Engineering Team builds tools for quantum algorithm developers: cloud development environments, circuit design tools, and resource estimation systems that help researchers write, simulate, and optimize quantum algorithms for the world's first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. We're hiring a platform engineer who bridges software infrastructure with GPU-accelerated computing, someone who can improve our AWS platform while helping researchers run quantum simulations efficiently on GPU clusters. Role Overview We're looking for someone to partner with our existing platform engineer, splitting responsibilities across a growing platform and making it easier for quantum researchers to do their best work. That platform includes AWS infrastructure, Terraform configs, CI/CD workflows, and the GPU clusters our researchers depend on for large-scale, computationally intensive quantum simulations. There's a real opportunity to shape how all of it evolves. The right person for this role is comfortable making judgment calls under uncertainty; they will have a lot of latitude, and accountability to match.

Requirements

Experience: 5+ years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles.
Production AWS experience: Built and maintained systems on ECS/EKS, managed multi-account networking (VPCs, security groups), and dealt with real-world infrastructure complexity.
Infrastructure as Code: You've written and maintained Terraform (or Pulumi/CDK) in production, including applying ongoing changes as requirements evolved.
CI/CD: Improved build pipelines in production (reduced build times, increased reliability, made deployments easier to debug), including experience with GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent.
GPU/HPC experience: Supported GPU workloads in production environments, including code optimization, CUDA debugging, and job scheduler setup.

Nice To Haves

Background in scientific computing, research infrastructure, ML platforms, or early-stage startups (especially research computing vendors).
Security & compliance experience: You've implemented auth systems (Auth0/Okta), managed encryption (KMS), or worked on FedRAMP/compliance-driven infrastructure. FedRAMP experience is a strong plus.
Exposure to quantum computing SDKs (Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane) or hybrid classical-quantum workflows is a plus, but not required; genuine interest in quantum computing matters more than prior exposure.

Responsibilities

Own our AWS infrastructure end-to-end and actively shape how it evolves; building, not just maintaining.
Reduce friction in the deployment pipeline so developers can ship without infrastructure blockers.
Harden systems with intention: lock down IAM roles, container images, and authentication flows in ways that reflect a clear understanding of where the real risks are.
Implement monitoring and alerting that catches production issues before users notice them.
Make deployments faster to roll out, easier to roll back, and less prone to failure.
Lead incident response and post-mortems when necessary.
Make GPU clusters and other infrastructure invisible to the researchers running it.
Own CUDA compatibility and driver versions across heterogeneous GPU clusters.
Build standardized SLURM job submission workflows that researchers can use without help.
Package and containerize Python simulation code for reproducible execution.
Monitor job health across utilization, cost, and runtime efficiency.