Test and Inspection Engineer

IonQ•College Park, MD

2d•$124,000 - $186,000•Hybrid

About The Position

IonQ is building the packaging and test capability behind the next generations of trapped ion quantum computers. Inspection of ion trap chips is already demanding on current devices, and it gets considerably harder as the critical area of each chip grows by orders of magnitude. The next device generation arrives in the middle of next year, and our inspection process has to be ready for it. This role owns automated optical inspection from end to end, from the equipment itself through to the data and the reporting that comes out of it. You will take a process that is currently manual, slow and not yet catching everything we need it to catch, and turn it into something repeatable that scales. It is a high ownership role in the QPU Production team in College Park, Maryland, and it exists because this problem now deserves its own engineer.

Requirements

Owned, programmed or deployed automated inspection, machine vision or optical metrology equipment in a laboratory or a manufacturing setting.
Comfortable writing the code that sits around it.
A degree in engineering, physics, optics, materials science or a related technical field is a good route in, as is equivalent hands on experience.
Wafer level inspection is much closer to this work than surface mount inspection.
Someone who will ask the science team why a specification is written the way it is, and who is content to work through a problem nobody has fully defined yet.
Strong inspection and automation experience and the curiosity to pick up the data and reporting side.

Nice To Haves

Three or more years with automated inspection, machine vision or optical metrology.
Strong Python or similar, applied to instrument control, image processing or data automation.
Experience organising technical data, for example databases, pipelines or automated reporting.
A semiconductor, advanced packaging, photonics or MEMS background, ideally with some materials characterisation.
Comfortable working hands on in a cleanroom or laboratory environment.

Responsibilities

Own our automated optical inspection capability for ion trap chips and packaged Quantum Processing Units, both before and after packaging.
Develop inspection recipes that reliably detect and classify micron scale defects.
Build automated capture, storage and reporting of trap chip and QPU test data.
Produce certificates of conformance that are repeatable and auditable.
Work with equipment vendors on selection, acceptance and troubleshooting.