Senior Embedded Systems Architect

Location: Ottawa, ON (on-site)
Employment type: Full-time permanent
Salary range: $130,000 – $165,000 CAD per year; competitive salaries will be negotiated commensurate with experience — this range is a guideline

About Q-Block Computing: Q-Block Computing builds quantum systems that operate in the real world. The company develops quantum timing, quantum-secure communications, and quantum computing platforms engineered for the performance, reliability, and environmental resilience that mission-critical applications demand — systems designed to be deployed, maintained, and trusted by operators who cannot afford ambiguity about whether the technology works.

The long-term vision is deeper than any single platform. Q-Block is pursuing a mission to decode Nature's foundational model — to build instruments of sufficient precision and coherence that they become tools for understanding the physical universe at its most fundamental level. Commercialization and science reinforce each other by design.

About this role: The Senior Embedded Systems Architect shapes the embedded control platform that drives Q-Block's quantum hardware — the firmware architecture, subsystem interfaces, and engineering standards that let a distributed, real-time control system scale reliably across products and generations. The role carries the architectural authority for a platform that has to be deterministic, maintainable, and manufacturable at once.

The successful candidate is a senior embedded engineer with the judgment to make architectural decisions that hold up over years of delivery, and the discipline to build the abstractions, standards, and review practices that make those decisions real across a growing team. They are equally comfortable drafting an interface control document, reviewing a peer's DMA configuration, and making a defensible build-versus-buy call on an RTOS.

The role reports into and works closely with the Technical Lead — Orchestration Control and senior leadership, and sets the technical direction for the Embedded Firmware Engineers on the team.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the firmware and embedded systems architecture for a distributed, real-time control platform.
• Establish subsystem interface specifications, communication protocols, and data pipeline architectures that enable deterministic, low-latency coordination across control units.
• Evaluate and select microcontroller families, peripheral ICs, bus architectures, and real-time scheduling strategies based on system-level performance, scalability, and reliability requirements.
• Design reusable firmware libraries, hardware abstraction layers, and board support packages that decouple application logic from hardware specifics.
• Architect synchronization and timing distribution subsystems to support coherent multi-unit operation at sub-microsecond precision.
• Lead firmware design reviews and establish coding standards, testing frameworks, version control practices, and development workflows for the embedded team.
• Collaborate with hardware, FPGA, platform, and systems teams to translate system-level requirements into clean embedded design specifications.
• Mentor and develop Embedded Firmware Engineers and related technical staff; conduct code reviews, guide architectural decisions, and raise the standard of engineering practice across the group.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks proactively; lead root-cause analysis for system-level failures and ensure corrective actions are durable rather than cosmetic.
• Contribute to technical proposals, architecture documentation, and IP capture processes as appropriate.
• Stay current on emerging embedded architectures, real-time operating systems, and mixed-signal control techniques; bring useful advances into the platform deliberately.
• Contribute to a culture of ownership, rigor, and honest technical discussion across the engineering organization.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering Physics, Physics, or a closely related field;
  Master's degree preferred.
• 8+ years of professional experience in embedded systems design, with at least 3 years in…