Quantum Algorithms Researcher; Senior​/Software

Location:

Daresbury, England

Compensation: GBP
78,900 - 92,900 GBP / year

Psi Quantum's mission is to build the first useful quantum computers: machines capable of delivering the breakthroughs the field has long promised. Since our founding in 2016, our singular focus has been to build and deploy million-qubit, fault-tolerant quantum systems.

Quantum computers harness the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that even the most advanced supercomputers or AI systems will never reach. Their impact will span energy, pharmaceuticals, finance, agriculture, transportation, materials, and other foundational industries.

Our architecture and approach is based on silicon photonics. By leveraging the advanced semiconductor manufacturing industry, including partners like Global Foundries, we use the same high-volume processes that already produce billions of chips for telecom and consumer electronics. Photonics offers natural advantages for scale: photons don't feel heat, are immune to electromagnetic interference, and integrate with existing cryogenic cooling and standard fiber-optic infrastructure.

That approach has since been tested at the highest level of scrutiny the U.S. government applies to emerging technology, and it has held up. In 2025, Psi Quantum closed a $1 billion funding round that valued the company at $7 billion. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a $100 million Letter of Intent under the CHIPS and Science Act, followed by a $125 million agreement with DARPA under Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, Psi Quantum's most valuable U.S. government agreement to date.

This year, we also broke ground on our utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia, and continued building out our Chicago site. Victor Peng, our CEO, and co-founder Jeremy O'Brien, now Executive Chairman, lead a team and board that reflects how seriously the world is taking this build, joined this year by Intel's Lip-Bu Tan and Atomico's Niklas Zennström.

Psi Quantum also develops the algorithms and software needed to make these systems commercially valuable. Our application, software, and industry teams work directly with leading Fortune 500 companies, including Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Mercedes-Benz, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Mitsubishi Chemical, to prepare quantum solutions for real-world impact.

Quantum computing is not an extension of classical computing. It represents a fundamental shift, and a path to mastering challenges that cannot be solved any other way. The potential is enormous, and we now have the funding, the government validation, and the sites under construction to make it real.

Psi Quantum is seeking a Senior Quantum Algorithms Researcher to join the Quantum Algorithms team within our Applications Development department. This role offers the opportunity to help define how large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers will be applied to consequential real-world problems in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and materials science.

At Psi Quantum, we believe in the transformative potential of quantum computing to solve problems beyond the reach of classical computation. For the first quantum computers to be useful, we believe they must be fault tolerant.

This conviction shapes our approach to applications research. Rather than developing algorithms for near-term or intermediate-scale devices, we focus on quantum algorithms designed for the fault-tolerant regime, where, specifically, the cost of a quantum algorithm is determined by its runtime on a fusion-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer built on silicon photonic hardware.

In the Quantum Algorithms team, we adapt and develop quantum algorithms, scope and identify promising use cases, and analyze resource requirements. In your role, you will translate computational tasks into abstract specifications for quantum algorithms, analyze their asymptotic performance, and help define meaningful problem instances that lie beyond the practical reach of classical computation. You will also work closely with Psi Quantum's Compilation team to develop explicit instantiations of these algorithms and understand their resource requirements on our architecture.

We are particularly interested in candidates with deep expertise in quantum simulation. Relevant areas may include simulated time-evolution…