Validation Engineer, Cryogenic

PsiQuantum • Milpitas, CA

13h

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 cryogenic validation engineer will be responsible for the design characterization and validation of cryogenic electro-optical assemblies. This includes the development and implementation of methods and techniques to characterize and validate electro-optical assemblies operating at cryogenic temperatures.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree or above in Engineering, Physics or Material Science, and 3+ years of industry experience.
• Experience with testing in cryogenic environments.
• Experience working with optical and electrical test equipment such as optical power meters, lasers, optical spectrum analyzer (OSA), oscilloscopes, function generators (AWG), vector network analyzer (VNA).
• Experience developing test methods and optimization, tuning/calibration algorithms.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with single photon detectors is preferred.
• Experience working with optical fibers, photonic integrated circuits is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the design and experimental teams across the company to learn from current best known methods.
• Review and provide feedback to the electro-optical assemblies design.
• Define figures of merits and validation plans for the cryogenic electro-optical assemblies.
• Design and build laboratory cryogenic setups comprised of light sources, detector, switches; function generators, oscilloscopes, etc. to validate design functionality of the electro-optical assemblies in cryogenic environments.
• Contribute to the development of software scripts to automatically drive the measurements setups and feed data into a database.
• Contribute to the development of algorithms to perform data analysis and extract key performance parameters.
• Contribute to the execution of the validation plans, including debugging and characterization the cryogenic electro-optical assemblies.

What This Job Offers

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