Senior Scientist - Quantum Computing

Overview

At PNNL,our core capabilities are dividedamongmajor departments that werefer to as Directorates within the Lab,focused on a specific area of scientific research orother function, with its own leadership teamand dedicated budget.

Our Science & Technologydirectoratesinclude National Security,Earthand Biological Sciences, Physical and Computational Sciences, and Energy and Environment. In addition, we have an Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory,a Department of Energy, Office of Science user facility housed on the PNNL campus.

The Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate's (PCSD’s) strengths in experimental, computational, and theoretical chemistry and materials science, together with our advanced computing, applied mathematics and data science capabilities, are central to the discovery mission we embrace  our most important resource is our people—experts across the range of scientific disciplines who team together to take on the biggest scientific challenges of our time.

The Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division (ACMDD) focuses on basic and applied computing research encompassing artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, computing technologies, and data and computational engineering. Our scientists and engineers apply end-to-end co-design principles to advance future energy-efficient computing systems and design the next generation of algorithms to analyze, model, understand, and control the behavior of complex systems in science, energy, and national security.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory seeks a Senior Scientist in Quantum Computing to provide scientific leadership and technical expertise in quantum computing architectures, compilation, large-scale simulation, and fault-tolerant scalability, supporting PNNL’s contributions to the Quantum Science Center (QSC) and PNNL’s Internal Research Investment QuAADS.

This position is focused on end-to-end, system-level research across the quantum computing stack and hybrid quantum HPC systems. The successful candidate will lead and conduct research in aligning architectures, compilers, error models, simulation, and hybrid quantum–classical execution to determine how fault-tolerant quantum computing can be realized in practice for scientific workloads. A key responsibility of this role is extending PNNL’s existing quantum software and simulation capabilities, including large-scale, noise-aware simulation on leadership-class HPC systems.

This is a senior technical role with substantial engagement in research, modeling, and software direction.

The Computer Scientist will lead research and development efforts in the design and evaluation of quantum computing architectures and fault-tolerant systems, focusing on feasibility, scalability, and implications for scientific workloads. The successful candidate will select and develop technical approaches for complex problems with limited oversight and will deliver results through publications, reusable software, and technical products.

The role includes leading and integrating task-level contributions across disciplines, working closely with hybrid algorithms, scientific applications, and experimental validation teams. The candidate will contribute to coordinated development across relevant stack components—such as compilation strategies, error and noise modeling, simulation methods, and hybrid execution models—ensuring technical consistency and clear documentation.

A major focus is conducting large-scale, noise-aware simulation and advancing and applying PNNL’s Northwest Quantum Simulator (NWQ-Sim) to study architectural scalability, compilation strategies, and fault-tolerance tradeoffs under realistic assumptions. The candidate will lead small to medium project tasks (and serve as PI or co-PI where appropriate), supporting scoping, scheduling, and milestone execution while integrating the work of collaborators.

The Computer Scientist will contribute to proposal development and business development activities, generating technical ideas and leading technical sections of proposals within their area. The role includes mentoring junior staff, postdoctoral…