Principal Software Engineer
Q-CTRL
Software Engineering
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Posted on May 9, 2025
About us
Founded in 2017, Q-CTRL has grown to become the global leader in quantum. We’re using control to solve the hardest problems facing quantum technology, improving hardware performance and accelerating pathways to useful quantum computers and other technologies. As a product-led company, we bring together diverse teams such as product, design, engineering and research to help achieve our mission of making quantum technology useful. Join us to help shape the quantum future.
As one of the fastest growing companies in the quantum sector, we’ve had a number of key milestones:
- In November 2023, we announced an industry-first partnership with IBM Quantum Services, natively integrating our performance management software with all IBM quantum computers. Building off of this relationship, in September 2024 we started offering two services via IBM’s new Qiskit Functions Catalog as an inaugural partner.
- Designed and moved our Global HQ offices and lab space into the first purpose-built (and award winning) commercial and research facility for a quantum technology company in Australia.
- Continued to deliver real world outcomes across the quantum sectors, with our work with Australian Defence on software-ruggedized quantum sensing for navigation without GPS, as featured in the New York Times.
- In October 2024, we announced our record breaking expansion of our Series B funding round to USD $113M, with $59M USD of new capital.
- Grew our global presence to include Los Angeles, Berlin, and Oxford - as well as the recently announced office in San Francisco.
From educating the workforce on how quantum computing works, to building the next generation of quantum sensors, to delivering massive performance gains for end-users, it all starts with hiring the right talent. If you want to help us build the Quantum future, read on.
About the role
We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architectural modernization of Q-CTRL’s platform, enabling faster delivery, greater scalability, and enhanced product team autonomy. This role is critical to realizing the Opal Suite architecture, a scalable and resilient ecosystem for supporting rapid product innovation and expansion. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will oversee efforts across multiple teams and departments, working closely with their technical leads and engineering managers.
As a thought leader in platform architecture, you will drive technical excellence across teams, guiding the development of a modular, high-performance platform that supports seamless integrations and empowers product teams to innovate independently.
What you’ll be doing:
- Drive architectural direction as an individual contributor across products with an emphasis on back-end and platform engineering, yet with a mindset that is agnostic of a specific technology stack.
- Influence technical strategy and OKRs, aligning stakeholders across multiple teams and seniority levels, with a horizon beyond 12 months.
- Drive and set engineering excellence across the organisation, particularly around patterns and abstractions that span products and domains.
- Oversee and often own large cross-team or even cross-department technical solutions, involving technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Mentor engineers at all levels on technical topics, particularly around system design, acting as dotted-line leader in some instances, with the assistance of an engineering manager
- Expertly articulate trade-offs in complex design to audiences inclusive of executive and senior leadership.
- Spend around 30% of time coding and 70% of time leading, flexing these percentages depending on company needs.
- Other duties within the Employee’s skills and experience, or with reasonable training.
It is essential that you’ll have:
- Proven track record of leading large-scale architectural transformations, particularly in cloud-native and microservice environments
- Expertise in designing and implementing high-performance data storage, APIs, workflow orchestration, event-driven and distributed systems.
- Exceptional technical documentation and communication skills (architecture diagrams, design documents, technical decisions).
- Strong programming skills in languages like Python, Rust, or Go.
Ideally, you’ll have:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience as a passionate individual contributor with a focus on platform architecture.
- Experience with DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools.
- Strong understanding or a deep drive to rapidly learn about quantum computing technologies. No physics background is required, however. This is a software engineering role.
- Machine learning experience a bonus
Why Q-CTRL?
Flexibility: We embrace workplace flexibility so you worry more about your impact vs a rigid work schedule.
Attractive salary: You’ll get to have the start-up impact without the start-up wages.
Equity: We want people to have a sense of ownership in what they do and offer the potential for equity share and annual bonuses.
Cash bonus: We recognize exceptional performance and impact by offering annual discretionary cash bonuses.
Resources: We are well funded by the world’s best technology investors, letting us chase our ambitions with minimal constraints.
Parental support: We offer paid parental leave to support you and your loved ones.
Diversity: We’re an equal opportunity employer and actively support initiatives like the ‘Global Women in Quantum’ program to help expand the quantum workforce.
Unique culture: You’ll be surrounded by some of the world’s leading physicists, engineers, product, marketing and design people (to name a few!) with a strong desire to learn and transfer knowledge.
Meaningful values: You’ll work with an incredibly supportive team who work consistently to deliver our core values to be real, be trusted, be just and to be revered.
Personal development: We provide you with a personal development and wellness budget.
Make a dent: Last but not least you’ll have the unique opportunity to help set the direction for this revolutionary technology and truly make an impact that matters!
Q-CTRL aims to bring together cross-functional teams from many different backgrounds to help achieve our goals - we strongly encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements mentioned in the job posting.
Please be advised that our communications will only come from the @q-ctrl.com domain. All our active job postings are available on our company website.
To recruitment agencies, we do not accept unsolicited branded profiles and are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
