Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

At Q-CTRL, Quantum Computing Engineering is a global team of software engineers and infrastructure experts, combining deep technical expertise with a startup mindset to deliver real impact through software innovation. Our work is underpinned by robust standards, and by embracing the three virtues. Our team excels in areas across back-end, front-end, machine learning, and platform engineering.

We transform Q-CTRL's world-leading technological breakthroughs into commercial software products with applications across defense, research, and industry. We work closely with Product, Design, and Research teams to accelerate the path to quantum advantage worldwide.

The Q-CTRL Infrastructure team is the backbone of the Q-CTRL Platform and all of the products that run on it. The mission of our team is to ensure that all of Q-CTRL's infrastructure remains available, performant, reliable, scalable, and secure so that Q-CTRL can continue to deliver its revolutionary quantum technology.

As a Staff Cloud Platform Engineer at Q-CTRL, you will be a technical leader driving our Cloud Platform engineering strategy. You'll architect and evolve the Q-CTRL Platform, our Kubernetes based infrastructure powering quantum modeling and GPU accelerated workloads. You'll develop and execute a comprehensive roadmap and vision for Cloud Platform engineering that aligns with organizational goals and drives innovation across the business.

You will be a force multiplier within our engineering organization, elevating your immediate team's capabilities and collaborating with engineering teams company wide. Your deep expertise in Cloud Platform tooling will enable you to mentor engineers at all levels, establish best practices, and champion a culture of excellence in cloud native engineering. You'll lead by example in optimizing our end to end processes while empowering others to achieve technical mastery and operational excellence.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Architecting our software stack strategy: Leading technical decisions across platform architecture, defining technology standards, and driving adoption of cutting edge solutions while mentoring teams on implementation.
• Setting strategic direction for cloud engineering: Establishing organizational cloud standards, driving adoption of emerging practices, championing DevOps transformation, and leading cross functional engineering maturity initiatives.
• Designing our development ecosystem: Defining CI/CD infrastructure roadmaps, establishing golden paths for developer workflows, evolving ephemeral environments and creating infrastructure as code frameworks for confident delivery.
• Defining multi cloud and scalability strategy: Leading architectural decisions for high availability systems, establishing cloud agnostic patterns, and providing technical leadership for client specific infrastructure.
• Being consistently learning, as staying on top of your game is part of your job.
• Other duties within the Employee's skills and experience, or with reasonable training.

Ideally You'll Have:

• 7+ years of industry experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering or equivalent.
• Worked with Kubernetes in a production environment before and are intimately familiar with all the things needed to create a Kubernetes cluster in a production scenario.
• Expert knowledge about public clouds such as AWS, GCP or Azure to know how to configure them to current best practices as infrastructure-as-code and how that applies to a Kubernetes environment.
• Worked with a variety of Linux distributions and can troubleshoot common problems.
• Proficiency in software development and programming and can quickly understand what an application is doing by looking at its codebase, sometimes with minimal information at hand. We primarily work with applications that use Go, Javascript and Python.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A keen eye that identifies areas for improvement and takes initiative in implementing new technologies and solutions while building things the right way.

It Would Be Fantastic If You Have These Skills/Experience But Not Essential:

• Relevant Kubernetes certifications such as CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
• Relevant public cloud certifications such as AWS SAA/SAP or GCP ACE/PCA.
• Familiarity with the CNCF and its various projects.
• Experience using GitOps tools such as Argo CD or Flux CD.

Q-CTRL is the global leader in AI-powered quantum control infrastructure software. We build the tools that make quantum technology useful, solving the hardest challenges in quantum computing and quantum sensing to deliver real-world impact.

Founded in 2017, we operate globally with offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, and Oxford. Our teams bring together technical and multi-disciplinary expertise across the product lifecycle, and we're hiring talent to help scale every part of the business. We work quickly to turn cutting-edge science into deployable technology.

In 2024 we raised US$113 million in Series B funding, the largest aggregate investment for a quantum software company. Six months later we delivered the first commercial quantum advantage with Ironstone Opal, our field-validated quantum navigation solution for defense and industry.

At Q-CTRL, we prioritize outcomes over hours. We offer flexibility, equity potential, and competitive benefits that reflect our high-performance culture. If you're ready to help shape the future of quantum, we'd love to hear from you!