Sr Digital System Designer

PsiQuantum•Palo Alto, CA

7d•Remote

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. Job Summary: We are looking for a digital-hardware system-designer to join our System-Architecture team. You will work in a multi-technology environment and will contribute to shaping and defining the digital-logic systems which drive our photonic quantum computer.

Requirements

Bachelor's or master's degree in Electrical or Computer Engineering or related discipline.
5+ years of relevant work in digital design.
Knowledge of SystemVerilog (or VHDL) for design and simulation.
Experience working with FPGAs (Xilinx preferred) and associated tooling.
Strong critical thinking skills to devise creative and analytical approaches to solving novel, loosely-defined complex problems.
Team player with an ability to work effectively across departments and time-zones.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to engage a variety of audiences.
Experienced Python programmer who strives to write clear code in the context of a small team of contributors.
Pro-active with the ability to work independently with limited direction, in a fast-moving start-up environment

Nice To Haves

Distributed system experience: involving event correlation from multiple sources, under real-time constraints.
Experience with High Level Synthesis tools (e.g. Xilinx Vitis).
Experience with Python for verification (Cocotb).
Knowledge of photonics and linear optics is a plus.

Responsibilities

Gather and translate high-level abstract requirements into concrete hardware requirements.
Devise and implement low-latency algorithms and methods to solve various time-critical tasks that take place in the data-plane of an optical quantum computer.
Work with other digital-design experts to integrate algorithms into FPGAs.
Collaborate closely with physicists and digital designers to arbitrate design choices and optimize designs to meet algorithmic performance while matching latency, throughput and footprint constraints.
Write requirements and documentation.
Implement cycle-accurate Python models to be integrated in discrete-time-event simulations.
Implement SystemVerilog implementations matching Python models.
Write behavioral tests for implementations in Python.