Quantum Theorist

About the opportunity

Metric is partnered with a growth-stage quantum computing company building hardware that's already live with enterprise customers. The business is entering its next development phase, backed by a strong IP position and a defined route to commercial scale.

This is a theory-facing role at the heart of how the hardware roadmap gets decided. You'll model and stress-test photonic architectures and light-matter interaction schemes, working out where the real performance ceilings are before anyone commits lab time or budget to them, then staying close enough to the experimental side to know when the models need correcting.

Core responsibilities

• Evaluate candidate quantum architectures and interaction protocols, weighing error, complexity, and scalability trade-offs
• Keep models honest, benchmark against real experimental data and refine component-level design accordingly
• Model both current and future generations of the hardware, working with the applications team to connect component behaviour to computational performance
• Feed findings into the wider research direction through publications, patent input, and internal technical reviews

What you need

• Solid grounding in quantum optics and quantum computing architectures
• Comfortable building and maintaining your own simulation codebases
• Can take a problem from first principles to a usable answer independently, but also plugs into a collaborative team
• PhD-level physics background or equivalent research experience
• Some grasp of atomic physics, light-matter interactions, or the practical constraints of optical hardware
• Experience modelling cavity QED or atom-ensemble light interactionsA publication, preprint, or patent record in quantum tech
• Genuine interest in sitting between theory and experimental validation, not just one or the other
• Comfortable using AI tooling to speed up research output

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