Staff Quality Engineer

About the Mission

Alice & Bob is moving from research prototypes to a product: a quantum system delivered with its full software stack, under contractual acceptance, availability and non-regression commitments. Our first customer installation is planned for 2027, and the evidence that the system works as users expect is what makes that delivery possible.

About the Role

As Staff Quality Engineer, you will establish quality engineering as a discipline for our firmware production lane and bring the user’s point of view into how the system is verified. You will own the end-to-end test suites that exercise the system the way users do, and the test evidence behind customer acceptance and periodic non-regression. You will report to the team’s manager and work hands-on with developers, customer project teams, account managers and the hardware platform teams, acting as the quality reference through influence rather than authority.

Responsibilities

• Own acceptance and non-regression evidence for the delivered quantum system: complete and harden the acceptance test suite for the first customer delivery, run in-house dry runs before each software delivery, and produce test reports for provisional acceptance, service verification and periodic non-regression, in the customer’s format
• Maintain requirements-to-test traceability for contractual commitments, and contribute the test and verification sections of the Quality Assurance Plan
• Turn this work into a repeatable acceptance framework for future deliveries, customers and sites
• Build system-level test automation: end-to-end and API tests on the job execution stack (submission, lifecycle, results, errors, quotas) across simulator, emulated and real-hardware backends, plus end-to-end tests on our web interfaces
• Run hardware-in-the-loop tests on our in-house systems, and build shared test tooling (fixtures, environments, test data, flaky-test management, CI integration)
• Make the system-level suites usable as release gates, complementing the developers’ own tests
• Set quality standards for the firmware production lane: release criteria, merge and release gates that apply whether the code is written by a human or an AI agent, and the bug lifecycle for customer systems (intake, triage, severity scale)
• Make quality visible through metrics (escaped defects, flakiness, time-to-detect), and coach developers across teams on testing practices and testability, especially in a context of AI-assisted development
• Bring the quality and verifiability perspective into department-level initiatives and design reviews, and turn specifications into acceptance criteria with the product owner before implementation

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years focused on test automation or quality engineering with a cross-team or organisation-wide remit
• Strong Python, and the ability to read and contribute to production code, not only test code
• Proven experience building automated test suites from scratch for APIs and distributed systems (API/contract, integration, end-to-end) and integrating them as CI gates (GitLab CI or equivalent)
• Experience producing formal test evidence and reports for external customers (acceptance, service verification, non-regression), with rigor and traceability
• Experience testing systems with a hardware or physical component (hardware-in-the-loop, instruments, embedded or lab systems)
• A track record of setting quality standards across several teams and getting them adopted through influence, not authority
• Master’s degree or engineering school (Bac+5) in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Proficient English and excellent written and verbal communication; professional proficiency in French strongly preferred, as our first customer site works in French

Nice to have :

• Web end-to-end testing (Playwright or equivalent)
• Observability and non-functional testing (monitoring and alerting verification, load and stability testing)
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development and the testing challenges it raises
• Interest in quantum computing, and the ability to reason about circuit results and benchmark metrics
• Experience on a product delivered to external customers under contractual quality commitments

Recruitment Process

• Screening call with Doriane (30 min)
• Hiring Manager Interview (60 min)
• Technical Interview with the Team (60 min)
• Leadership Interview (30 min)
• Fit Interview (30 min)