---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer, Observability/Site Reliability at PsiQuantum'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-observability-site-reliability-psiquantum-palo-alto-j0wpzy678fvx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-02'
---

# Staff Software Engineer, Observability/Site Reliability at PsiQuantum

- **Company:** PsiQuantum
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Compensation:** $165k–$277k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-02
- **Apply:** https://www.psiquantum.com/apply?gh_jid=8037726003

## Job description

PsiQuantum’s mission is to build the first useful quantum computers—machines capable of delivering the breakthroughs the field has long promised. Since our founding in 2016, our singular focus has been to build and deploy million-qubit, fault-tolerant quantum systems.

Quantum computers harness the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that even the most advanced supercomputers or AI systems will never reach. Their impact will span energy, pharmaceuticals, finance, agriculture, transportation, materials, and other foundational industries.

Our architecture and approach is based on silicon photonics. By leveraging the advanced semiconductor manufacturing industry—including partners like GlobalFoundries—we use the same high-volume processes that already produce billions of chips for telecom and consumer electronics. Photonics offers natural advantages for scale: photons don’t feel heat, are immune to electromagnetic interference, and integrate with existing cryogenic cooling and standard fiber-optic infrastructure.

In 2024, PsiQuantum announced government-funded projects to support the build-out of our first utility-scale quantum computers in Brisbane, Australia, and Chicago, Illinois. These initiatives reflect a growing recognition that quantum computing will be strategically and economically defining—and that now is the time to scale.

PsiQuantum also develops the algorithms and software needed to make these systems commercially valuable. Our application, software, and industry teams work directly with leading Fortune 500 companies—including Lockheed Martin, Mercedes-Benz, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Mitsubishi Chemical—to prepare quantum solutions for real-world impact.

Quantum computing is not an extension of classical computing. It represents a fundamental shift—and a path to mastering challenges that cannot be solved any other way. The potential is enormous, and we have a clear path to make it real.

Come join us.

Job Summary

The Observability team builds and runs the telemetry platform that lets PsiQuantum see how its quantum computing systems, and the infrastructure behind them, are behaving. We collect metrics, logs, and traces from on-premises Kubernetes clusters, cloud infrastructure, and the custom hardware that makes up a photonic quantum computer, including control electronics and cryostats. Engineering, operations, hardware, and research teams rely on this data to run the machine, catch problems early, and work out what went wrong when something fails.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Observability team. You will wire up OpenTelemetry instrumentation and collection, run and scale Prometheus and Grafana, and turn raw signals into dashboards and alerts that people trust. A large part of the job is working with hardware teams: deciding what their devices should report, and getting that data off the device and into the platform reliably.

This is a hands-on role with Staff-level scope. You will own major parts of the observability stack from design through operation, share the team's on-call rotation, and set the conventions other teams follow when they instrument their own systems. You will combine hands-on delivery with technical leadership, sound judgment under ambiguity, and a strong bias toward simple, maintainable systems.

## Responsibilities

- Design, deploy, and operate the observability platform across on-premises Kubernetes and cloud, covering collection, storage, querying, visualization, and alerting for metrics, logs, and traces.
- Roll out OpenTelemetry across the fleet: deploy and configure Collectors, design telemetry pipelines, and help service teams adopt OTel SDKs and instrumentation in Python, Rust, and other languages.
- Run Prometheus in production, including service discovery, scrape configuration, recording and alerting rules, Alertmanager routing, retention, high availability, and long-term storage.
- Manage Grafana dashboards, alerts, and data sources as code so they are versioned, reviewed, and reproducible across environments.
- Work with hardware teams to instrument custom devices, control electronics, cryostats, and other lab equipment; build the exporters and collectors that bring device telemetry into the platform, including from equipment that was never designed to be monitored.
- Define and publish telemetry standards - metric and label naming, cardinality budgets, structured logging, trace context propagation, and resource attributes - so data from different teams and systems can be correlated.
- Partner with service owners and operations teams to define SLOs and alerts that reflect real impact, reduce alert noise, and make every page actionable.
- Take part in the team's on-call rotation: respond to incidents affecting the observability platform, help other teams diagnose production issues with telemetry, and lead blameless post-incident reviews through to completed fixes.
- Run the platform as a production service in its own right, with capacity planning, cost management, upgrades, backup and recovery, and monitoring of the monitoring stack itself, delivered through GitLab CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
- Use AI and LLM tooling to accelerate engineering and operational work responsibly - including coding assistants, query and dashboard generation, and incident analysis - while applying rigorous review, security, and validation practices.
- Work with the team's technical lead on architecture and roadmap; lead design reviews, mentor engineers, document consequential decisions, and coordinate with software, hardware, research, infrastructure, and operations teams to turn their observability needs into a shared plan.

Daily Functions

- Instrument and collect: Configure OTel Collectors and Prometheus scrape targets, write exporters, and help teams instrument new services and devices.
- Build and review: Write code and configuration, review merge requests for platform and dashboard changes, and simplify pipelines that are hard to understand or operate.
- Work with hardware teams: Learn how a new device or cryostat behaves, agree on what to measure and alert on, and get its data flowing.
- Watch and respond: Check platform health and alert quality, handle on-call pages, and help other teams debug with metrics, logs, and traces.
- Shape the platform: Work through storage, retention, cost, and tooling tradeoffs with the technical lead; unblock other engineers; keep near-term work aligned with the roadmap.
- Apply AI with judgment: Use LLM-assisted tools for queries, configuration, code, and documentation, then verify outputs to the standard expected for production infrastructure.

## Experience

- 8+ years of professional software, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering experience, including significant time building and operating observability systems in production.
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a closely related technical discipline is required.
- Deep hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana, including PromQL, recording and alerting rules, Alertmanager, exporters, dashboard design, and running both reliably at scale.
- Production experience with OpenTelemetry, including the Collector, OTLP, SDK and automatic instrumentation, and semantic conventions.
- Hands-on experience running workloads on self-managed, on-premises Kubernetes and in the cloud, with containers, Helm, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform; practical experience with GitLab and GitLab CI is strongly preferred.
- Strong programming skills in Python and at least one of Go or Rust, with the ability to write production-quality exporters, Collector components, and automation rather than only configuring off-the-shelf tools.
- Solid knowledge of Linux and networking fundamentals, including processes, filesystems, resource limits, DNS, TCP/IP, and TLS, and experience debugging distributed systems from the host up.
- Experience carrying a pager for production systems, leading incident response, running post-incident reviews, and designing alerts people act on.
- Staff-level technical leadership: leading design work, setting standards other teams adopt, mentoring engineers, influencing across teams, and communicating tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Proficiency with modern AI/LLM engineering tools, such as coding copilots and agents, model APIs, and retrieval workflows; a disciplined approach to privacy, security, hallucination risk, and generated-code review.
- Ability to work closely with hardware, electronics, and research teams across sites and time zones, in a fast-moving environment where requirements evolve as the quantum computer itself evolves

Nice to Haves

- Experience with scalable metrics, log, and trace backends such as Thanos, Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, Tempo, OpenSearch, or ClickHouse.
- Experience collecting telemetry from laboratory or industrial equipment over protocols such as Modbus, OPC UA, SNMP, SCPI, or serial interfaces, or through vendor SDKs.
- Familiarity with cryogenic, vacuum, laser, or other lab systems, or with software used in laboratories, data centers, or advanced manufacturing.
- Experience with high-frequency or high-cardinality time-series data, including downsampling, aggregation, and data lifecycle management.
- Experience running observability across multiple sites and hybrid on-premises and cloud environments, including sites with constrained network connectivity.
- Experience with eBPF-based observability, continuous profiling, or Kubernetes operators.
- Experience with SLO tooling, synthetic monitoring, or incident management platforms such as PagerDuty.
- Familiarity with VAST Data, Kafka, and AWS.
- Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or related open-source projects.
- A background in physics or quantum computing is helpful but not required; curiosity, systems thinking, and motivation to learn the domain are essential.

Note: PsiQuantum will only reach out to you using an official PsiQuantum email address and will never ask you for bank account information as part of the interview process. Please report any suspicious activity to recruiting@psiquantum.com.

We are not accepting unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. Base pay is one part of the total compensation package. Full-time roles are eligible for equity and benefits. Our compensation ranges reflect the cost of labor across multiple U.S. geographic markets, and we pay based on defined geographic zones. This position may be filled within one of the following U.S. geographic zones, each with its own salary range.

Actual compensation may vary outside of these ranges and is dependent on various factors including, but not limited to, a candidate's qualifications, relevant education and training, competencies, experience, geographic location, business needs, and internal equity. Your recruiter can share more details about the salary range applicable to your location during the hiring process.

- Zone 1 - Bay Area and NYC
- Zone 2 - Examples include Los Angeles and Washington DC
- Zone 3 - Examples include Austin, Chicago, and Sacramento
- Zone 4 - Examples include Nashville and Phoenix/Tempe and many remote locations

This position includes the following benefits: competitive health coverage for you and your dependents, 401(k) with company match, equity grants, access to financial wellness tools and planning resources, wellness benefits, family support programs, life and disability insurance, paid leave programs, company-designated paid holidays, discretionary time off (DTO), and an end-of-year company shutdown. Some of these benefits have eligibility requirements and may vary based on location, role, or employment status. Many of these benefits are subsidized or fully paid for by the company.

The estimated annual base salary range for this role is:

Zone 1 $235,600—$276,800 USD

Zone 2 $212,000—$249,100 USD

Zone 3 $188,400—$221,400 USD

Zone 4 $164,900—$193,800 USD

## About PsiQuantum

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: PsiQuantum is building and deploying the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers using a photonic approach and commercial semiconductor manufacturing.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series E)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2016
- **Founders**: Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, Prof. Terry Rudolph, Dr. Pete Shadbolt, Prof. Mark Thompson

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Quantum Computing
- **Target customers**: Enterprises, governments, and researchers in energy, materials, pharmaceuticals, finance, and national security sectors
- **Mission**: To build and deploy useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers that can solve previously intractable problems.

## Products & Services
- **[Omega Chipset]**: A silicon photonic chipset, manufactured at scale at GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 (Malta, NY), integrating all photonic components (superconducting detectors, single photon sources, optical switches) for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
- **[Construct Platform]**: A free, open-access software platform launched in May 2026 for designing quantum circuits, writing and simulating fault-tolerant quantum algorithms, and optimizing resources. Supports visual circuit design and Python-based tools.
- **[Utility-Scale Quantum Computers]**: Modular, fault-tolerant quantum computers being built at two sites — Moreton Bay Central, Queensland, Australia (ground broken June 2026) and the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) in Chicago, USA.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Total Funding**: Not publicly disclosed, but the company raised a **$1 billion Series E** financing round in 2025. It also signed a **$100 million Letter of Intent** with the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act (May 2026).
- **Key Metric**: **500+ employees** (as of 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - U.S. Department of Commerce (CHIPS Act incentives)
  - DARPA (advanced to final phase of US2QC program within the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative)
  - U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory ($22.5 million contract)
  - Australian Commonwealth and Queensland governments (A$940 million investment package announced April 2024)
  - GlobalFoundries (manufacturing partner)
  - Hartree Centre (UK research partnership)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Broke ground on the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer site in Australia (June 2026).
  - Opened a new Test & Validation Lab at Griffith University, Brisbane (2024-2025).
  - Launched Construct software platform to all developers (May 2026), expanding community reach.
  - Established an R&D facility at STFC Daresbury Laboratory, UK.
  - Government Advisory Board established with senior former U.S. officials.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Photonic Approach**: Uses photons (light) as qubits, which do not feel heat or electromagnetic interference. This allows control electronics to be colocated close to the qubit, reducing system size and cost.
- **Semiconductor Leverage**: Manufactures chips at a commercial, high-volume foundry (GlobalFoundries), leveraging trillions of dollars of existing infrastructure — a stark contrast to the custom cleanroom approach of most quantum startups.
- **Modular & Fiber-Based Scaling**: Uses standard telecom optical fiber to network chips, solving the inter-chip connection challenge with ultra-low-loss (reduced from ~50% to ~1%), enabling error-correction-compatible scaling.
- **Government Backing**: Deep partnerships with U.S. and Australian governments, DARPA, and key national labs signal strong trust and long-term strategic alignment.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale to Utility**: Building the world’s first utility-scale (million-qubit) fault-tolerant quantum computers and deploying them as infrastructure.
- **Geographic Expansion**: Simultaneous buildouts in Australia (Moreton Bay) and the U.S. (Chicago), with R&D in the UK.
- **Ecosystem Development**: Growing the developer community through the free Construct platform to build applications and algorithms before the hardware is fully online.
- **Technology Stack Integration**: Continuous improvement of the Omega chipset, cryogenic cabinets, networking, and control systems as an integrated platform.

## Why Work Here
- **Groundbreaking Mission**: Opportunity to work on one of the hardest engineering challenges of our time — building useful quantum computers that could reshape energy, materials, pharma, and national security.
- **Career Impact**: Be part of a team scaling from “lab to fab” with a strong track record of meeting DARPA milestones and government contracts. The company is moving from R&D into construction and deployment.
- **Flexible Work Policy**: Offers in-office, hybrid, and remote options depending on team and location.
- **Benefits**:
  - Competitive health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
  - 401(k) with company match, equity grants, financial wellness tools
  - Generous parental leave policy
  - Discretionary Time Off (DTO) plus federal holidays and end-of-year company shutdown
  - $200 quarterly health reimbursement
  - 12 therapy + 6 coaching sessions with Modern Health
  - Annual membership to Care.com
- **Locations**: Palo Alto (HQ, CA), Brisbane (QLD, Aus), Chicago (IL), Daresbury (UK), Malta (NY). Global team with multiple R&D and manufacturing hubs.

## Sources
1. [PsiQuantum Official Site](https://www.psiquantum.com/)
2. [PsiQuantum About Page](https://www.psiquantum.com/about)
3. [PsiQuantum Careers Page](https://www.psiquantum.com/careers)
4. [PsiQuantum Technology Page](https://www.psiquantum.com/technology)
5. [Wikipedia - PsiQuantum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PsiQuantum)

## Other roles at PsiQuantum

- [Director of Facilities](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-facilities-psiquantum-brisbane-queensland-kzndafakj7wz) — Brisbane Queensland, Australia
- [Project Manager - Facilities](https://feeny.ai/job/project-manager-facilities-psiquantum-milpitas-n487e0a59erc) — Milpitas, CA
- [Sr. HPC Engineer - Platforms](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-hpc-engineer-platforms-psiquantum-palo-alto-16gja3fxhysg) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Employee Relations Business Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-employee-relations-business-partner-psiquantum-milpitas-73j4r1k8y8a0) — Milpitas, CA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Quantum Algorithms Researcher (Senior/Staff)](https://feeny.ai/job/quantum-algorithms-researcher-senior-staff-psiquantum-daresbury-nctswt8sm88z) — Daresbury, United Kingdom
- [Manager, Quantum Applications Software](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-quantum-applications-software-psiquantum-australia-aafnt4w4njnx) — Australia
- [Photonics Layout Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/photonics-layout-engineer-psiquantum-palo-alto-nwc6kh7z2ajn) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Staff Firmware Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-firmware-engineer-psiquantum-milpitas-cb55bydby0vf) — Milpitas, CA
- [NPI Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/npi-test-engineer-psiquantum-singapore-kr3qnb455gst) — Singapore
- [Director, Electro-Optical Validation](https://feeny.ai/job/director-electro-optical-validation-psiquantum-milpitas-dap9x9y9dba9) — Milpitas, CA