Senior Scientific Software Engineer — Autoresearch

Summary

QuEra Computing is hiring a Senior Scientific Software Engineer to build systems that automate theoretical and computational research in quantum computing.

You will develop a reusable autoresearch platform that generates hypotheses, implements and evaluates candidates, and uses accumulated evidence to guide further exploration. Initial applications include automated performance improvement across our software repositories, quantum-error-correction code discovery with QEC theorists, and architecture search with compiler researchers.

This is a hands-on engineering role with substantial technical ownership. You will combine classical search and optimization with AI agents, and develop methods that progressively improve the research process itself.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the autoresearch platform, including programmable search strategies, agent and tool integration, and reliable execution of long-running experiments.
• Develop and evaluate search and optimization methods for generating, selecting, refining, and combining candidates under limited computational budgets.
• Collaborate with theorists and compiler researchers to translate research questions into search spaces, constraints, objectives, and executable evaluation procedures.
• Establish reproducible evidence of progress through correctness checks, strong baselines, noise-aware measurement, and independent validation; deliver useful discoveries and software improvements.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills and a record of independently delivering substantial research or developer tools, with proficiency in Rust or a comparable systems language and scientific programming in Python.
• Deep practical experience in search and optimization, particularly combinatorial optimization, evolutionary algorithms, meta-heuristics, or automated algorithm design.
• Hands-on experience building automated discovery or optimization systems that iteratively generate candidates, execute experiments, and learn from feedback.
• Strong experimental judgment: choosing meaningful objectives, allocating evaluation budgets, diagnosing failures, and distinguishing genuine improvements from noise or evaluation artifacts.
• Ability to work with researchers across disciplines and turn mathematical ideas into reliable computational tools.

Preferred Qualifications

• LLM-guided search, automated algorithm design, program synthesis, or autonomous research systems.
• Evolutionary computation, quality-diversity methods, tree search, hyper-heuristics, or adaptive selection of search operators.
• Bayesian optimization, bandit methods, experimental design, or other approaches to allocating expensive evaluation budgets.
• Performance engineering and automated software tuning, including profiling, benchmarking, and statistical treatment of measurement noise.
• Infrastructure for parallel experiments, isolated execution, checkpointing, and reproducible tracking of candidates and results.
• Compiler optimization, scheduling, routing, or hardware-software architecture search.
• Computational algebra, constraint solving, theorem proving, or formal verification.
• Quantum computing, quantum error correction, fault-tolerant architectures, or quantum simulation.
• Systems that improve their own search strategies, tools, or experimental workflows and reuse findings across tasks.

We value depth in relevant areas; experience across every topic is not expected.

We welcome experienced engineers and researchers, including recent PhD graduates with substantial implementation ownership. A PhD is welcome but not required.

The approximate base salary range for this position is $160,400 - $220,400.

We consistently monitor external market data and update base salary ranges accordingly.  We determine base compensation decisions on several factors, including as geographic placement, role-specific knowledge, skills, and/or experience.  In addition to our base salary offerings, we also provide equity grants for all new hires.

QuEra is committed to cultivating a diverse work environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We highly value diversity in our current and future employees and do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.