psiquantum · Palo Alto, California · Palo Alto, California · U.S. Field
<p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>Come join us. </p> <p><strong>Job Summary</strong><br><br>The Observability team builds and runs the telemetry platform that lets PsiQuantum see how its quantum computing systems, and the infrastructure behind them, are behaving. We collect metrics, logs, and traces from on-premises Kubernetes clusters, cloud infrastructure, and the custom hardware that makes up a photonic quantum computer, including control electronics and cryostats. Engineering, operations, hardware, and research teams rely on this data to run the machine, catch problems early, and work out what went wrong when something fails.<br><br>We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Observability team. You will wire up OpenTelemetry instrumentation and collection, run and scale Prometheus and Grafana, and turn raw signals into dashboards and alerts that people trust. A large part of the job is working with hardware teams: deciding what their devices should report, and getting that data off the device and into the platform reliably.<br><br>This is a hands-on role with Staff-level scope. You will own major parts of the observability stack from design through operation, share the team's on-call rotation, and set the conventions other teams follow when they instrument their own systems. You will combine hands-on delivery with technical leadership, sound judgment under ambiguity, and a strong bias toward simple, maintainable systems.<br><br><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design, deploy, and operate the observability platform across on-premises Kubernetes and cloud, covering collection, storage, querying, visualization, and alerting for metrics, logs, and traces.</li> <li>Roll out OpenTelemetry across the fleet: deploy and configure Collectors, design telemetry pipelines, and help service teams adopt OTel SDKs and instrumentation in Python, Rust, and other languages.</li> <li>Run Prometheus in production, including service discovery, scrape configuration, recording and alerting rules, Alertmanager routing, retention, high availability, and long-term storage.</li> <li>Manage Grafana dashboards, alerts, and data sources as code so they are versioned, reviewed, and reproducible across environments.</li> <li>Work with hardware teams to instrument custom devices, control electronics, cryostats, and other lab equipment; build the exporters and collectors that bring device telemetry into the platform, including from equipment that was never designed to be monitored.</li> <li>Define and publish telemetry standards - metric and label naming, cardinality budgets, structured logging, trace context propagation, and resource attributes - so data from different teams and systems can be correlated.</li> <li>Partner with service owners and operations teams to define SLOs and alerts that reflect real impact, reduce alert noise, and make every page actionable.</li> <li>Take part in the team's on-call rotation: respond to incidents affecting the observability platform, help other teams diagnose production issues with telemetry, and lead blameless post-incident reviews through to completed fixes.</li> <li>Run the platform as a production service in its own right, with capacity planning, cost management, upgrades, backup and recovery, and monitoring of the monitoring stack itself, delivered through GitLab CI/CD and infrastructure as code.</li> <li>Use AI and LLM tooling to accelerate engineering and operational work responsibly - including coding assistants, query and dashboard generation, and incident analysis - while applying rigorous review, security, and validation practic