Member of Technical Staff (Open Role)

Updated on October 15, 2026.

Unitary Foundation is a nonprofit research group building a quantum technology ecosystem that benefits the most people. We pursue our mission through building public goods, providing support for the open-source community and digital commons, and developing quantum’s open-source infrastructure.

We are hiring a Member of Technical Staff to help build, improve, and sustain open-source software for quantum computing. You’ll join a small technical team working with researchers, developers, national labs, universities, industry partners, and a global community of contributors.

Our portfolio spans quantum benchmarking and performance evaluation, error mitigation, compilation, simulation, and quantum error correction, alongside emerging areas where open-source tools can make a meaningful difference. Projects such as Metriq, Mitiq, UCC, Clifft, and qldpc-challenge illustrate that range. We develop our own tools and contribute to software across the wider ecosystem.

We believe quantum technology needs an open software substrate. We care about software that people can use and depend on: clear interfaces, reliable behavior, useful documentation, reproducible results, and maintainable designs. We also care about how that software reaches people. Understanding users’ needs, engaging contributors, and connecting collaborators are part of building tools that have lasting impact.

You might bring deep quantum expertise, a strong background in scientific software engineering, or a combination of both. You are excited to write high-quality code, and you take ownership of ensuring it delivers real value to the community.

What You’ll Do

Build and sustain open-source software. Design, implement, test, review, and release improvements to tools across our portfolio and the wider community. Help make research ideas useful through thoughtful APIs, documentation, examples, packaging, and performance-aware engineering.
Advance the digital commons. Contribute to our community-led benchmarking initiative, build better open datasets, develop new resources that help scientists, developers and users to do their work better.
Turn research needs into useful tools. Work with colleagues and external collaborators to understand technical problems, explore approaches, and deliver software and research artifacts that others can build on.
Engage users and contributors. Gather feedback, support contributions, explain technical choices, and connect people working on related problems. Participate in community calls, unitaryHACK, and other UF programs where your technical perspective can help.
Do research and communicate results. Develop and test ideas, analyze results, and share findings through examples, demos, technical reports, papers, or presentations.
Help shape what comes next. Identify opportunities to improve existing tools and develop new ones. As you grow into the role, you may lead projects, guide collaborations, or help set technical priorities.

Across this work, there is room to explore AI-assisted software development and research workflows, with careful evaluation of their usefulness and the reliability of their results.

About You

We’re interested in candidates who bring strengths in several of the following:

Experience building, maintaining, or substantially contributing to software that other people use, ideally open source.
A strong sense of ownership and stewardship. You bring independence, initiative, and genuine investment in the products you help build, taking responsibility not just for their development, but also for their adoption, impact, and long-term sustainability.
Strong programming skills and the ability to work effectively with scientific or research software. Python is particularly relevant across our portfolio; experience with other languages and software stacks is also valuable.
Good judgment around testing, documentation, code review, APIs, reproducibility, maintainability, and performance.
Experience in quantum computing or a strong scientific software engineering background and an interest in developing quantum expertise.
Ability to collaborate with researchers, engineers, users, and contributors, including people with different backgrounds and levels of technical experience.
Interest in open-source public goods and a passion for community building.

You do not need expertise in every area we work on. We welcome both quantum researchers who build strong software and software engineers who want to apply their skills to quantum computing.

A PhD in physics, computer science, mathematics, engineering, or a related field is one possible background for this role, but it is not required. We care most about the contributions you can make, your technical judgment, and your ability to learn and collaborate.

Helpful Experience

Relevant experience could include quantum benchmarking, error mitigation, compilation, simulation, quantum error correction, scientific computing, research infrastructure, performance engineering, or maintaining open-source projects.

Experience supporting users, reviewing community contributions, or turning research prototypes into dependable tools is also valuable.

Working at Unitary Foundation

Flexible hours. We care about the work getting done and accommodate a range of schedules and individual needs.

A collaborative team. We’re a small group of people who value thoughtful technical work, mutual support, and getting to know one another.

Remote work and a global community. This is a fully remote role open to candidates worldwide. We work across many time zones and collaborate with researchers and open-source contributors across cultures and institutions.

Benefits. Unitary Foundation offers benefits to employees worldwide. For U.S. employees, these include a full 401(k) plan and healthcare benefits.

Unitary Foundation offers a salary range for this position of $115,000 - $140,000, dependent on candidates’ experience, expertise, and location around the world.

Apply

Applications are open.

Please include a resume or CV and a short note about software or technical work you have built, maintained, or meaningfully contributed to. Tell us what you contributed, who it helped, and which aspects of Unitary Foundation’s work interest you.

We welcome examples from open-source projects, research, industry, and independent work.