Experimental Physicist

About us:  D-Wave (NYSE: QBTS) is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services, and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers—and the only company building both annealing quantum computers and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing today to benefit business and society. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, scheduling, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling. D-Wave’s technology has been used by some of the world’s most advanced organizations including Mastercard, Deloitte, Davidson Technologies, ArcelorMittal, Siemens Healthineers, Unisys, NEC Corporation, Pattison Food Group Ltd., DENSO, Lockheed Martin, Forschungszentrum Jülich, University of Southern California, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Our company and its innovations have appeared in the pages of Time Magazine, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, INC Magazine and Wired. As of August 8, 2022, our company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as $QBTS. 

About the role:   We are looking for a creative, energetic, and self-motivated Experimental Physicist to join our Processor Development (PD) team. The PD team at is composed of experienced and talented superconducting designers, fabrication engineers, software developers and physicists who work together to create the processors at the heart of our quantum computer and are constantly pushing the boundaries of the technology of the future.   In this challenging and exciting position, you will work with a multi-disciplinary team and regularly communicate and collaborate with other processor development scientists, device designers, engineers, cryogenic experts and applications developers. 

You will work in one or more of the following areas:

• Characterizing, understanding and reducing noise in superconducting circuits
• Modeling, assessing and improving real-world performance of our quantum processors
• Characterizing and calibrating our superconducting quantum processors
• Parametric design of novel devices and/or device enhancements to improve processor performance or enable new capabilities
• Assessing and understanding the impact of the processor’s environment, including packaging, IO, electronics and cryogenic elements and developing models and approaches to improve it

What you’ll do:

• Develop and execute experimental procedures to quantify, understand, and operate a wide range of superconducting devices
• Come up with new ideas to improve processor operation or performance and develop parametric designs to implement them
• Develop theoretical models and simulations to represent and understand experimental results on physical devices
• Develop analysis routines to fit theoretical models to data and to detect outlier behaviour in large complex systems of superconducting devices
• Regularly and clearly document experimental results for the broader processor development team
• Create and contribute to software infrastructure for modeling, calibrating and operating processors
• Communicate and collaborate with other internal teams at D-Wave including marketing, intellectual property, applications development and engineering

What you’ll bring:

• Ph.D. or M.Sc. in physics or a related discipline, or equivalent experimental research experience
• Strong critical thinking and technical problem solving skills
• Skill in independent research and evidence of deep understanding in your area of expertise
• An ability to come up to speed in new technical topics quickly and effectively
• Strong software development experience related to experimental design and automation, data acquisition, and data analysis; and a willingness to learn new programming languages and software concepts as needed
• A collaborative mindset and a demonstrated ability to work effectively on an interdisciplinary team, on a wide variety of problems
• Excellent communication skills and experience with summarizing experimental results for a broad audience
• Ability to adapt to shifting priorities in a time-sensitive environment
• Exceptional candidates will have a solid background in one or more of the following: quantum information, digital or analog superconducting devices, device physics, noise models and characterization