Senior Software Engineer - Calibration Operations
Oxford Quantum Circuits · Barcelona
At OQC, we aren’t just theorising about the future; we’re building it. Born from a philosophy of bold innovation, we’ve transitioned quantum computing from an academic ambition into a commercial reality - and we’re just getting started.
The Purpose
As a Senior Software Engineer in Calibration Operations, you’ll design and build the software systems that automate calibration, benchmarking and bring-up of OQC’s quantum computers.
Your work will support automated system bring-up, daily calibration and performance remediation, delivering reliable software for both production systems and rapidly evolving research environments.
The Role
You’ll focus on system architecture, distributed workflows, event-driven services, observability and production reliability. You’ll build the services and engineering capabilities that make calibration workflows scalable, resilient and easier to operate, diagnose and support.
Quantum computing knowledge is helpful, but not required. You’ll work closely with quantum engineers and research scientists who provide the domain expertise, alongside software engineers and platform teams.
You’ll own software projects from requirements and architectural design through deployment and ongoing operation. Alongside hands-on development, you’ll contribute to architectural decisions, establish engineering patterns and share software-engineering knowledge across the team.
What You’ll Be Working On
- Design the architecture of scalable calibration and benchmarking services, building reliable software for automated system bring-up, daily calibration and performance remediation.
- Develop event-driven systems to orchestrate calibration workflows and communicate their status and results, defining event schemas, service interfaces and data flows across distributed systems.
- Build observability into calibration platforms through structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards and alerting.
- Improve the reliability, fault tolerance and recovery behaviour of long-running scientific workflows, supporting both production requirements and evolving R&D needs.
- Integrate calibration services with control, data, compiler and platform infrastructure.
- Diagnose and resolve issues across services, workflows, infrastructure boundaries and production environments, developing tools that make systems easier to operate and support.
- Establish engineering patterns for testing, deployment, monitoring and operational readiness, working with colleagues to support architectural decisions and share effective approaches.
What We’re Looking For
- Strong Python programming skills and experience applying modern software-engineering practices.
- Experience designing and delivering complex software systems from concept to production, with a strong understanding of system design, software architecture and service boundaries.
- Experience with distributed systems and asynchronous or event-driven architectures.
- Practical experience with event streaming, message brokers, queues or publish-subscribe systems.
- Experience designing observable systems using logs, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards and alerts.
- An understanding of reliability concepts such as retries, idempotency, failure recovery, backpressure and graceful degradation.
- Experience designing APIs, data models, event schemas and integration contracts.
- Strong testing and debugging skills across local, development and production environments.
- Experience with containers, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and cloud-native deployment environments.
- The ability to communicate architectural decisions clearly and collaborate across software, engineering and scientific disciplines.
- Degree-level knowledge in computer science, software engineering, physics or a related discipline.
The ‘Nice-to-Haves’
- Knowledge of quantum computing or an interest in learning about quantum systems.
- Experience with calibration, benchmarking, optimisation or automated experimentation.
- Familiarity with machine-learning infrastructure, reinforcement learning or black-box optimisation.
- Experience integrating software with laboratory equipment, control systems or physical hardware.
- Experience developing user-facing operational or scientific tools.
- Contributions to open-source projects, technical publications or conference presentations.
- A postgraduate qualification, such as an MSc or PhD, or equivalent experience in computer science, software engineering, physics or a related discipline.
Why Join OQC
You’ll apply your software architecture and production-engineering experience to the systems that bring quantum computers into operation and keep calibration workflows running reliably.
This is an opportunity to take ownership beyond initial deployment, designing services that are observable, resilient and practical to support. Working alongside quantum engineers and research scientists, you’ll contribute to architectural decisions and build software that meets the demands of both production operation and evolving scientific research.
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