Senior Software Developer - Automation Systems

About Xanadu:

Xanadu's mission is to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.

At Xanadu, we are learners, innovators, researchers, collaborators and problem solvers. We are creating something that has never been built before. Few people in their life will be able to be a part of something like this where, if we are successful, the technologies we develop will solve some of the world's most challenging problems and literally change the world. And that is something to be excited about.

Your role and responsibilities:

As a Senior Software Developer on our AI team, you will be a hands-on individual contributor who sets the technical bar for the internal AI research platform that accelerates Xanadu's R&D. You will spend your time architecting systems that scale, writing and reviewing code, and solving the hardest technical problems yourself, and in doing so, you will help steer the team's technical direction.

Your stakeholders are world-leading researchers, scientists, and engineers inside Xanadu — theorists, experimentalists, and software developers — who depend on these tools daily. You will bring a product mindset to that relationship: deeply understanding how your users work, what slows them down, and shipping tools they actually adopt.

You will:

• Set and own the technical direction and architecture of our agentic AI research system, designing for scale, reliability, and performance from day one.
• Be a technical leader for the development of automation systems in best engineering practices: define technical scope, review code and designs, mentor, and unblock — driving quality and delivery without compromising velocity.
• Partner directly with your internal users (researchers, experimentalists, engineers) to translate fuzzy research needs into well-scoped products, and validate that what you ship is actually used.
• Build automated pipelines for structuring unstructured documents and executing complex research tasks at scale.
• Develop the SDKs, APIs, and data visualizations that internal users interface with, treating developer experience as a first-class product concern.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards: automated tests, CI/CD pipelines, code review, logging, and monitoring.

At Xanadu, we primarily work with GitHub, Python, Rust, Postgres, Docker, Terraform, and AWS. Proficiency in these technologies is essential.

Basic qualifications and experience:

• BSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, or a related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading the design and delivery of non-trivial systems and guiding other engineers (through architecture ownership, code review, and mentorship).
• Proven ability to scale systems: designing and operating high-throughput, distributed, or large-scale production services — and diagnosing the performance, reliability, and cost issues that come with scale.
• Product experience: a track record of building software for real users and iterating based on their needs and feedback — you understand who you are building for and why.
• Proven background building and deploying production systems on AWS.
• Strong knowledge of asynchronous, concurrent, and/or queueing system design.
• Command of the full software development lifecycle (version control, testing, CI/CD, logging, monitoring).

Preferred qualifications and experience:

• MSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, or a related field.
• Experience building agentic systems with coding/agentic tools such as Claude (Claude Code), Codex, or Gemini CLI.
• Experience shipping internal developer tools, SDKs, or platforms used by technical teams.
• Familiarity with ML/AI fundamentals, and experience benchmarking LLM/agentic workflows (nice to have — we will help the right engineer grow into the ML/AI domain).
• Experience with ML-assisted data processing, labeling, and distillation.