Scientific Software Lead — Infrastructure

Description

The company is hiring a lead for its Scientific Software group to run the Infrastructure team and drive the building of shared language, compiler and runtime foundations for its scientific software stack.

The team builds common language, compiler and runtime tools used by research and engineering across the company's quantum software stack. Its focus is language design, program semantics, intermediate representations, compiler analyses and transformations, and execution frameworks.

The role combines people management with hands-on technical leadership. You will work with researchers and engineering leads to turn specialized needs into coherent, reusable infrastructure. The scope may also cover tools for automated research and program optimization.

Strong programming language and compiler knowledge matters most, along with an interest in mentoring, sound architecture choices and supporting teams with varied technical needs. Quantum computing experience helps but is not required.

Responsibilities

• Hire, coach and manage Infrastructure engineers, give clear feedback, and set priorities that weigh core foundations against the needs of partner teams.
• Set the team's technical direction together with Scientific Software leadership, covering language abstractions, intermediate representations, compiler interfaces and shared execution infrastructure.
• Shape language and compiler design through explicit semantics, careful reasoning about correctness and workable implementations. Take part in design reviews, code reviews and critical engineering work.
• Work with research and engineering teams to learn their requirements, identify abstractions worth sharing, and drive adoption through documentation, tooling and stable interfaces.
• Keep the infrastructure well tested, fast, maintainable and compatible, and plan its migrations and evolution.

Requirements

• Track record of leading a technically strong software team, including mentoring, setting priorities and delivering results.
• Deep hands-on experience in compiler engineering and language design, including intermediate representations, analyses, transformations and extensible compiler architectures.
• Solid grounding in program semantics, type systems, formal methods or related theory, applied to real engineering decisions.
• Proven record of building substantial compiler, language, runtime or developer infrastructure that other engineers or researchers use.
• Strong software engineering skills and the ability to stay close to implementation, debugging and review.
• Good judgment in balancing generality, correctness, performance and delivery, and the communication skills to settle requirements across teams.
• Depth in relevant areas counts more than breadth. A PhD is welcome but not required.
• Preferred: substantial contributions to well-known open-source compiler, language or runtime projects such as LLVM/MLIR, Clang, GCC, Rust, CPython or comparable ecosystems.
• Preferred: extensible compiler frameworks, domain-specific languages, staged programming or meta-programming.
• Preferred: type systems, program semantics, abstract interpretation, effect systems or formal verification.
• Preferred: interpreter and virtual machine design, bytecode, runtime interfaces or deterministic execution.
• Preferred: Rust and Python, including infrastructure spanning several implementation languages.
• Preferred: compiler testing, differential testing, fuzzing, equivalence checking or performance benchmarking.
• Preferred: leading shared infrastructure through architectural change and adoption by several teams.
• Preferred: supporting research-oriented development and turning experimental ideas into maintained infrastructure.
• Preferred: automated program synthesis, search-based optimization or autoresearch systems.
• Preferred: scientific computing, hardware compilation or quantum software.

Conditions

The approximate base salary range is $150,000 to $240,000.

Base pay is set by geographic placement, role-specific knowledge, skills and experience, and the range is reviewed as external market data changes.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate in hiring or promotion on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other legally protected characteristic.

Benefits

• Equity grants are provided to all new hires, in addition to base salary.