Senior Software Engineer, QPU Software

Day to day in this role

• You’ll develop and maintain the services and client SDKs used to build and execute programs on Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS). This includes services used by internal researchers and public customers alike, for whom stability and reliability is essential
• Services are written in Rust, Golang, and a combination of the two (over FFI), with tools in Python and Typescript. Clients are offered in Python, Rust, C, and Golang. Our web apps are written in Typescript & React
• You’ll extend and refine OpenAPI & gRPC APIs in ways that offer deeper or more efficient access to the quantum processor.
• These services have been in production since 2018, but many opportunities remain for optimization and new product features
• You’ll assume pager duty to ensure that QCS remains operational around the clock. Operational issues today requiring after-hours responses are rare
• You will hold significant sway over the future architecture of our services and client SDKs

You'll work closely with several teams within Rigetti

• Our embedded software engineering team, which develops the cutting-edge hardware driving the quantum processor. QCS services interact directly with that hardware, and it is critical that they mesh together tightly
• Quantum engineers and applications developers, who rely on this service to do their research and offer exciting, novel ideas to refine and optimize it
• Our infrastructure team, in order to ensure that the service remains performant and highly available
• Your immediate team members who own other parts of the overall system, including compiler and language development
• You’ll also be encouraged to present your work externally at conferences and in publications

About You

• You relish a sense of ownership and agency over your work, and you learn quickly
• You prize the quality of the software that you write. 
• You approach your work with a sense of urgency appropriate to the impact either on users or on the team itself
• You communicate clearly and effectively
• You have experience building mission-critical, reliable, and performant systems
• You rigorously test and document software intended for production use, follow common language conventions and well-known patterns, and rely heavily on automation for testing and deployment
• You are experienced in profiling, benchmarking, and tracing code in both the development and deployment environments
• You know how to design an API to avoid breaking changes, and how to migrate clients when it can’t be avoided
• You are knowledgeable about non-trivial parts of service design, such as distributed authorization, error handling, and versioning
• You work independently - you’re comfortable leading the design and implementation of a software package or service from high-level requirements
• You enjoy leading a high-level architecture discussion one moment, and then translating that discussion into reliable production code the next
• You are functional and agile in environments with incomplete information and evolving priorities and requirements, and you actively shape the requirements and product rather than awaiting guidance.

Key Requirements

• Discipline and rigor in your code, design, and communication
• Fluency in Rust. Competence in Golang and Python
• Deep experience building and maintaining schema-driven, widely accessible web APIs (one or more of OpenAPI, GraphQL, gRPC/Protobuf)
One or more of the following:
• Experience developing and supporting popular open-source software libraries to include issue triage and community messaging
• Experience with event streaming systems (e.g. Kafka, Kinesis)

Nice to Have

• Experience in programming language and/or compiler development
• Experience building intuitive, elegant web applications with React
• Experience building and maintaining SDKs
• Experience architecting, building, and deploying microservice architectures with Kubernetes
• Academic background in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Physics
• Knowledge of quantum computing and applications.