Staff Firmware Engineer

PsiQuantum • Palo Alto, CA

1d

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: The mission of PsiQuantum's Staff Firmware Engineering role is to contribute to the development of robust and scalable firmware solutions which are integral to the underlying quantum computer system. The Firmware Team is part of the larger electronics team at PsiQuantum and collaborates with the hardware, digital design, system architecture, controls software, and quantum system validation teams.

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, linux development experience.
• Communications protocol development.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with hardware and system architecture teams to define system-level architectures, board designs, and component selection, with emphasis on timing, signal integrity, and control requirements.
• Lead cross-functional technical discussions to drive firmware architectural decisions and align implementation choices with system performance, reliability, and scalability goals.
• Define, implement, and maintain well-specified interfaces between firmware, hardware, and higher-level software, including low-level drivers, communication protocols, and python APIs.
• Design, implement, and validate embedded firmware across bare-metal, RTOS, and embedded Linux environments, including device drivers, closed-loop control algorithms, calibration routines, and deterministic state machines.
• Partner closely with controls, hardware, systems, and test engineers to integrate firmware into complex systems and ensure correct end-to-end behavior under nominal and fault conditions.
• Mentor senior and mid-level firmware engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees