At a previous co-op at the Institute for Quantum Computing, I worked under Dr. Bradley Hauer. His wife, Allison MacDonald, was the Director of Science at D-Wave. An unbelievably lucky connection, and a seriously impressive couple. Their kid is going to be terrifying.
Allison helped build momentum for the quantum club I had co-founded by giving a couple of talks on the science at D-Wave. At some point I mentioned that I was looking for a co-op, and that if she heard about an opening, I would love to be considered.
D-Wave didn’t normally put co-op postings on job boards for non-BC universities, but Allison was able to pull a posting from her team onto WaterlooWorks, so I applied, and ultimately landed the position.
Within a week of starting, D-Wave acquired Quantum Circuits Inc., expanding their quantum specialty to versatile gate-model quantum computing in addition to the optimization-focused quantum annealing they’d held a monopoly over for a decade and a half.
It was an amazing co-op. I was on the Burnaby IC design team, a small group responsible for the layout of the quantum annealing processor. Over my eight months there, I designed a test chip to assess a new fabrication technique, a radiation detection chip, and two magnetometer packages.
Before I left, I signed a full-time offer for the following summer, and I’m hyped to go back.