Lead Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

At OQC, we aren’t just theorising about the future; we’re building it. Born from a philosophy of bold innovation, we’ve successfully transitioned quantum computing from an academic dream into a commercial reality. The most exciting thing is that we’re just getting started and we’ve recently closed our £260 million Series C funding round – the largest fundraise ever completed by a quantum computing company in Europe.

🏢 About Oxford Quantum Circuits

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) is a quantum computing company that builds hybrid compute platforms connecting classical and quantum resources into a single, extensible system.

🎯 The Role

Based in London, this is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with significant ownership of OQC's hybrid compute architecture. You'll define stable interfaces across diverse compute resources, make critical architectural decisions and establish the engineering standards that allow the platform to scale.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical direction of OQC's QAIDC hybrid spine, Hybrid IR, device-capability model and execution-record contracts.
• Design stable abstractions across CPUs, AMD GPUs, simulators and QPUs, enabling workloads to move reliably across classical and quantum resources.
• Architect capability matching, task orchestration, fallback mechanisms, policy enforcement and backend adapters across the platform.
• Set engineering standards for reliability, security, testing, observability and extensibility while remaining highly hands-on with implementation.
• Lead integrations with Dell/AMD infrastructure, Databricks, QPU systems and customer environments.
• Coordinate technical contributors across Product, Engineering, Commercial and leadership teams, turning complex requirements into clear priorities and technical decisions.
• Shape the platform for long-term evolution, ensuring today's architectural choices can support new compute resources and increasingly sophisticated hybrid workloads.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Significant experience as a senior distributed-systems architect or engineer building compute platforms, orchestration systems, ML infrastructure or similarly complex distributed technology.
• Deep hands-on engineering expertise in Python, Go or Rust.
• Strong experience designing APIs, containerised systems and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Slurm or comparable workload orchestration technologies.
• Strong understanding of security and observability within distributed platforms.
• Proven ability to design stable interfaces across heterogeneous compute or hardware resources.
• The technical depth to set architectural direction while remaining highly hands-on with engineering and implementation.
• Strong ownership and communication skills, with experience working effectively across multiple technical and commercial disciplines.
• Degree or equivalent practical experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related discipline.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience building enterprise platforms, data products or technology for regulated customer deployments.
• Familiarity with quantum computing or hybrid classical-quantum products.
• Experience integrating complex platforms with external infrastructure, hardware or customer environments.
• A pragmatic and curious approach to solving problems in fast-evolving technical environments.
• A relevant professional or postgraduate qualification.

🎁 Benefits

You will join a world-class team at the forefront of the next computational era. We offer a culture of bold innovation, the chance to work with unique lab infrastructure, and the opportunity to see your work redefine the limits of computation.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility