Experimental Physicist; Fluxonium Development

Staff Experimental Physicist (Fluxonium Development)

D-Wave (NYSE: QBTS), D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. We are the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the only company building both annealing and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum, today. Our quantum computers— the world’s largest—feature QPUs with sub‑second response times and can be deployed on‑premises or accessed through our quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime.

More than 100 organizations trust D-Wave with their toughest computational challenges. With over 200 million problems submitted to our quantum systems to date, our customers apply our technology to address use cases spanning optimization, artificial intelligence, research and more. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how we’re shaping the quantum‑driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow:

You can read more about our company and our innovations in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Wired and across many whitepapers.

At D-Wave, we’re helping customers realize the value of quantum computing today and are shaping the quantum‑driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow.

We are looking for a creative, energetic, and driven Staff Experimental Physicist to join our Processor Development (PD) team. The PD team is composed of experienced and talented superconducting designers, fabrication engineers, software developers and physicists who work together to create the processors at the heart of our quantum computers and are constantly pushing the boundaries of the technology of the future.

In this role, you will provide technical leadership in experimental characterization, calibration, and control of superconducting gate‑model processors and fluxonium qubits. You will define experimental strategies, benchmarking and error mitigation approaches, and system requirements needed to support near‑term error correction demonstrations and future processor architectures.

You will collaborate across multiple project areas, including qubit and gate performance, noise and coherence characterization, control and readout scaling, and interactions between device design, control hardware, and the cryogenic environment. As a senior contributor, you will operate with significant independence, apply strong technical judgement to prioritize high impact work, and support the broader PD team through mentorship, documentation, and cross‑functional collaboration.

• Lead experimental characterization of fluxonium qubits and processor components through quantitative modeling and data driven analysis.
• Investigate and understand decoherence and noise mechanisms, and propose improvements in device design and cryogenic operation to mitigate them.
• Develop, calibrate, and validate high fidelity single qubit and two qubit gates, reset and readout, using standard and novel benchmarking protocols.
• Develop error mitigation and performance improvement strategies.
• Diagnose scaling limitations to support near‑ and long‑term error correction demonstrations.
• Collaborate with designers on device parameter studies and simulations to define measurement primitives and requirements for improved processor performance.
• Share your results and ideas with the broader PD team through regular and clear documentation.
• Create and contribute to Lisp software infrastructure for modeling, calibrating and operating qubits and processors.

• Ph.D. in quantum computing or a related experimental field plus four years’ experience in quantum technology development, or equivalent combination of academic and government or industrial research experience.
• Expertise in one or more of the following: superconducting devices, gate model processor development, device fabrication, RF engineering and low‑noise electronics.
• Strong software development skills for technology development or experimentation, including familiarity with…