How did I find myself working in quantum?
I could never have imagined working in quantum computing. I studied electrical engineering at university, and for years I assumed I'd end up in renewable energy — finding cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels for a smarter grid. Instead, my path wandered through a series of fascinating industries: designing and testing specialised electronics for satellites, then building bi-directional EV chargers. These experiences help hone my software engineering skills and hardware integration abilities, but most of all, it taught me how to effectively work within a team. I've always been drawn to a new challenge in an unfamiliar field.
Funnily enough, the turn came outside of work. Cooking is my great passion, and during a hiatus spent working as a chef I got talking to a quantum physicist who urged me to look into the field. The pitch was simple: a fast-growing industry with a desperate need for engineers willing to point their skills at the hardest problem there is — quantum error correction. And the rest is history.
What do I love most about working at Riverlane?
This world of complex ideas and cutting-edge technology felt daunting at first, but the more you get to know it, the more you see the value you can bring.
Quantum computers are extraordinarily powerful but also extraordinarily fragile — their qubits are easily disturbed, and errors creep in constantly. Quantum error correction (QEC) is what makes them usable: it works alongside the machine in real time, identifying and correcting those errors as the computation runs. Without it, useful quantum computing simply isn't possible, which is what makes it one of the hardest and most important challenges in the field.
Getting there takes expertise from every discipline — people bringing their own judgement and perspective to push the technology forward. That's what makes Riverlane special. On any given day you might be working alongside theoretical physicists with multiple postdocs and seasoned engineers with decades in industry, all of them generous with what they know. It's an environment built for learning, where everyone is invested in helping you get better at quantum error correction.
What surprised me most, though, is how much of the job happens with other people — and not just inside Riverlane. A big part of this role is working directly with our partners: understanding their problems, shaping the direction of the work together, and translating between very different technical worlds. The engineering is hard, but being able to build those relationships and communicate clearly is just as important. If you enjoy that side of the work as much as the technical depth, you'll thrive here.
A typical day as a Systems Engineer at Riverlane looks a bit like this...
The systems engineering team occupies a unique position at Riverlane, sitting between our researchers and scientists on one side and our product engineers on the other. We're the first line of implementation and prototyping — the people who turn ideas into something real enough to advance a project or a collaboration. We work in partnership with every part of the company, but our focus is always on practical implementation: building, testing, and proving things out. We're action-oriented by nature, and we anticipate where the technology is heading so we can stay a step ahead.
8:45 — Arrive at the office. I grab a small breakfast from the office kitchen — usually fruit and granola — and have a quick catch-up with my line manager and colleagues over coffee.
9:00 — Fed and caffeinated, I get the day started. I usually have several projects running at once, so the first thing I do is write out my tasks and rank them by priority. That ordering sets the shape of my day. Today the top item is a collaborative project with one of our partners, so I catch up on the emails and repository updates I've missed overnight, then get stuck into implementing the next piece of functionality for it.
10:30 — First meeting of the day. One of my projects has a bi-weekly catch-up where we review progress and line up the tasks needed to stay on our delivery timeline. These are some of my favourite meetings — they bring together project managers, product managers, engineers and scientists, so we can check the work is on track and, where someone's hit a bottleneck, figure out together how to clear it.
11:30 — A quick sync with one of our partnership leads to talk through a potential new collaboration. The goal is to understand the current landscape so I can pitch our work more effectively when I start speaking with the prospective collaborators directly.
12:30 — Lunch. There's really only one place to go in Cambridge: the market square. It's a lovely outdoor market with everything from gourmet food stalls to fresh produce to bike repair stands. A few of us grab something and eat at a picnic table looking out over King's College.
13:30 — Afternoon: internal work. I switch focus to one of our internal projects, where I'm benchmarking a GPU implementation. This is where I spend a lot of time profiling — hunting down bottlenecks, tuning kernels, and reworking the low-level details to squeeze out performance. It's one of my favourite parts of the job: you get to see the impact of a hardware design choice or an optimisation almost immediately, and there's always a new technique to pick up along the way.
15:00 — Sync with an external partner to trade updates on our joint project and talk through any blockers on either side. This is the outward-facing side of the role, and honestly, it's what makes it special. Being able to do your own deep technical work and build genuine relationships with people at partner companies — all pulling toward a shared goal — is what keeps the job fascinating for me.
15:30 — A technical talk. We run these most weeks: sometimes a colleague presents, sometimes the authors of a recent paper come in to talk through their work or a relevant topic in quantum error correction. It's a real privilege to learn straight from the people pioneering the field.
17:00 — The bell! A Riverlane tradition. When we hit a milestone — closing a funding round, winning a grant, a new Deltaflow deployment — our CEO says a few words, we ring the ceremonial bell in the common area, and celebrate with a glass of champagne. It's a lovely way to mark a company win and a good excuse to mingle and get to know colleagues you don't work with day to day.
17:45 — Home time. The end of the day always arrives faster than expected, and just like that, it's time to head home.
Looking back, what makes this role special isn't just the depth of the engineering — it's that no one solves these problems alone. The best days are the ones spent building something real and working shoulder to shoulder with partners and colleagues to get there. If that sounds like the kind of work you want to do, we'd love to hear from you.
Explore our open roles at riverlane.com/jobs.