Senior Test Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer, Photonics
PsiQuantum · Palo Alto, CA
- Level
- Senior
- Team
- Reliability
- Experience asked
- 5+ years
- Industry
- Industrial
- Posted
- Today
The role in 30 seconds
A senior reliability role at PsiQuantum (industrial) in Palo Alto, CA. On-call or incident-response experience.
- They ask for
- 5+ years
- Tools it names
- Root cause, Validation (IQ/OQ/PQ)
- Day to day
- some off-shift / weekend coverage
Read from the posting. The full description is below.
From the plant jobs report · week of November 2, 2026
Reliability Engineer roles in California: typical posted base $115k–$175k.
Median of the low and high ends of 68 live postings that list pay, out of 151 reliability engineer openings in California, read from manufacturers' own careers sites.
California plant jobs report →Pay by team and state →What moves pay →
How this role compares
Against 150 other live reliability postings in California.
- Base pay
- Not listed in this posting
- Experience asked
- Typical (5+ years)
Typical $115k–$169k, from 67 postings that list pay.
Similar roles usually ask 5+ years.
Skills these teams ask for most
- ✓ Root cause 72%
- New product launch 46%
- FMEA 37%
- Automation 29%
- ✓ Validation (IQ/OQ/PQ) 24%
- SPC 22%
✓ = this posting asks for it too. % = share of similar postings that mention it.
At a glance
Pulled from the posting text. If it's not listed here, the posting didn't say.
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- 1
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- 2
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Questions worth asking about this team:
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- 4
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Full description from PsiQuantumAs posted on their careers site.ShowHide
Job Summary
As an integral part of the team developing a photonic quantum computer, the Senior Test Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer will own the data pipeline and reliability of the systems that carry test results from our fleet of electro-optical test stations into our central data platform, making sure that when something breaks, we know about it immediately.
Responsibilities
- ◆Own the data pipeline connecting test stations to the central data platform: measurement uploaders, run creation, and run-to-test-request linking.
- ◆Build fleet-wide observability: dashboards, log pipelines, and metrics for station and data-pipeline health.
- ◆Define and maintain alerting/guardrails that catch regressions early (upload latency, stale heartbeats, clock drift) before they become data-loss incidents.
- ◆Harden shared infrastructure (uploader processes, heartbeat reporting, notification integrations) against common distributed-systems failure modes.
- ◆Investigate and root-cause fleet-wide reliability incidents using logs, timestamps, and API data, distinguishing station-side, server-side, and network/clock causes.
- ◆Partner with the data platform team and test software engineers to close gaps between station software and the central system of record.
Experience/Qualifications
- ✓BS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field with 5+ years of relevant experience (MS with 3+ years, or PhD with 0-2 years).
- ✓Experience building and operating reliable distributed systems or data pipelines.
- ✓Strong Python skills, comfortable with async and multi-process/service architectures.
- ✓Experience with observability stacks (e.g. Grafana, Loki) and designing effective alerts.
- ✓SQL proficiency for ad hoc investigation against production data.
- ✓Track record of root-causing distributed-system issues from fleet-scale evidence.
- ✓Experience in lab, manufacturing, or hardware test environments.
- ✓On-call or incident-response experience.
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.
Show full description ↓Show less ↑
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.
That approach has since been tested at the highest level of scrutiny the U.S. government applies to emerging technology, and it has held up. In 2025, PsiQuantum closed a $1 billion funding round that valued the company at $7 billion. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a $100 million Letter of Intent under the CHIPS and Science Act, followed by a $125 million agreement with DARPA under Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, PsiQuantum's most valuable U.S. government agreement to date. This year, we also broke ground on our utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia, and continued building out our Chicago site. Victor Peng, our CEO, and co-founder Jeremy O'Brien, now Executive Chairman, lead a team and board that reflects how seriously the world is taking this build, joined this year by Intel's Lip-Bu Tan and Atomico's Niklas Zennström.
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 Airbus, 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 now have the funding, the government validation, and the sites under construction to make it real.