Staff Software Developer
D-Wave Quantum
$167,000–$230,000
Jul 14, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor role building and maintaining the software layer that sits between D-Wave's internal engineering teams and its physical quantum processors, covering calibration, hardware interfaces, system testing, and operational monitoring. The work spans full-lifecycle development — architecture through deployment — and includes on-call support for the cloud-hosted quantum platform. The position also carries a technical leadership dimension: setting architectural direction and mentoring other developers on the team.
Staff level · 7+ years · Remote · Bachelor's required · Secret clearance · Full-time
Pay in the description: $167,000–$230,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The role is titled 'Staff Software Developer' and the JD describes cross-team technical leadership, architectural direction, and mentoring — consistent with a Staff-level IC role. Seniority is assessed as Staff accordingly.
The JD requires a Bachelor's degree in a named engineering or science discipline with 'demonstrated experience working on hardware-integrated systems.' The degree is stated as a hard requirement with no 'or equivalent experience' escape clause.
Clearance: the JD states the role 'requires an active U.S. government security clearance or the ability to qualify for one' and also references a Tier 2 background investigation. The level is not explicitly named as Secret, but Tier 2 investigations correspond to a Secret clearance; classified as Secret accordingly.
The 'compiled programming languages' and 'multithreading' requirements are stated in firm language under the main qualifications block but name no specific language (e.g., C, C++, Rust). They are retained as named capability gates since the JD treats them as hard requirements.
Hardware interface software experience ('designing, implementing, and optimizing software interfaces to hardware systems') is a hard gate stated in the requirements block; no specific tool or framework is named.
All Bonus Points items (Common Lisp/SBCL, Emacs, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, SQL, MongoDB, InfluxDB, Grafana, Redis, AI-assisted dev tools, quantum/HPC familiarity) are listed under an explicit 'Bonus Points' heading and are preferred, not required.
The posting is primarily for a US-based remote role (salary in USD, US benefits, US export control and clearance requirements), though onboarding and periodic travel to Burnaby, Canada are required. The caller has confirmed remote=true with a national candidate pool.
The export control clause notes employment may be contingent on US Person status or obtaining an export license — this is a practical constraint on the candidate pool beyond the clearance requirement.
Requires a Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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