SDN Control Plane - Quantum Networking

Job Description

Job Title: Senior Staff SDN Control Plane Lead – Quantum Networking. Location: Bothell, Washington, United States

This role focuses on designing and leading the control plane that manages quantum network resources in real time; The position plays a key role in enabling high-fidelity entanglement across distributed quantum systems.

Responsibilities:

Lead the design of a centralized software-defined network controller for quantum networks
Maintain a real-time global view of network telemetry, topology, and available resources
Architect a network orchestrator that handles time-based entanglement requests using advanced scheduling algorithms
Develop path calculation logic that accounts for loss budgets and network delays;
Implement conflict prevention to ensure resource reservations do not overlap on shared devices or links
Engineer the control plane to support automated hardware configuration and system state recovery
Collaborate with cross-functional teams working on quantum hardware and networking systems

Qualifications:

At least 8 years of experience in network engineering or distributed systems
Strong background leading the architecture of SDN controllers or complex resource schedulers
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Networking, or a closely related field;
Experience designing centralized control planes for high-availability systems
Strong understanding of performance-critical systems with strict latency constraints
Proficiency in C or C++
Experience with Go or Rust for performance-sensitive components

Preferred:

Deep expertise in SDN control plane architectures
Strong knowledge of optical network control planes
Experience managing physical-layer metrics such as signal-to-noise ratio and loss budgets in software
Background in systems where timing precision and latency budgets are critical;
Proven ability to build global topology managers that handle dynamic hardware constraints in real time