Technical Lead — Orchestration Control

Location: Ottawa, ON (on-site)
Employment type: Full-time permanent
Salary range: $120,000 – $175,000 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 Technical Lead — Orchestration Control is the principal technical authority for the real‑time control stack that drives Q-Block’s quantum hardware platforms. The role owns the architecture, roadmap, and delivery of the orchestration layer that unifies firmware, infrastructure, and systems engineering into a coherent, deterministic, scalable control plane. It is a senior leadership position with responsibility for the technical integrity of a system that has to work end‑to‑end, not just in parts.

The successful candidate has depth across embedded firmware, real‑time systems, networking, and application‑layer software, and the judgment to make architectural decisions that hold up across all of those domains y have shipped production hardware‑software systems, have led engineers through the full arc from architecture to delivery, and know how to balance near‑term delivery pressure against long‑term architectural integrity without sacrificing either.

The role reports to senior leadership and works closely with scientists, hardware engineers, software engineers, and external partners.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the technical architecture of the orchestration control stack spanning real‑time firmware, middleware, networking, and application layers.
• Establish system‑level performance specifications, including latency budgets, timing precision, throughput targets, and fault‑tolerance requirements.
• Design the command, sequencing, and scheduling framework that coordinates arrays of control nodes to execute synchronized operations at nanosecond precision.
• Lead cross‑team technical planning across firmware, infrastructure, and systems engineering; resolve interface conflicts and architectural trade‑offs with clear, documented reasoning.
• Define and maintain the integration test strategy for the full control stack; own system‑level acceptance criteria and the evidence behind them.
• Drive build‑versus‑buy decisions for middleware, real‑time frameworks, and toolchain components.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop a high‑performing engineering team; conduct architecture reviews, design critiques, and technical retrospectives that raise the standard of work across the group.
• Manage technical risk identification, mitigation, and escalation; lead root‑cause analysis on system‑level failures and ensure corrective actions are real rather than cosmetic.
• Collaborate with scientists, hardware engineers, and software teams to translate advanced and often ambiguous requirements into structured, executable control‑system specifications.
• Contribute to technical proposals, program planning, roadmap development, and IP documentation.
• Represent Q‑Block’s control platform in discussions with partners, customers, and government stakeholders as appropriate, at a level of technical depth and clarity that earns trust.
• 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 or Ph.D. is an asset.
• 10+ years of…