Senior Software Engineer - Photonic Ecosystem (f/m/d)

Your mission Your profile Why us? Location: Stuttgart or Munich, Germany Type: Full-time, hybrid (max. 1-2 days remote work per week) The future of AI computing builds on light. Q.ANT is building photonic processing systems that compute with light - delivering a scalable, energy-efficient alternative to transistor-based architectures for next-generation AI and HPC applications. As Senior Software Engineer - Photonic Ecosystem (f/m/d), you will own Q.ANT’s presence and credibility in the open source software ecosystem. Your mission is to make photonic computing accessible out of the box - ensuring that default installations of frameworks like PyTorch, JAX and vllm can leverage Q.ANT’s photonic hardware without friction. You will drive the photonic enablement of base libraries and AI frameworks from design through upstream acceptance and long-term maintenance, and serve as Q.ANT's trusted focal point in open source development communities. In this role, you will bridge internal teams - algorithms, compiler, device control, infrastructure, and system architecture - with the requirements of the external ecosystem. What You Will Do - Own the photonic enablement of the open-source software ecosystem - drive integration of Q.ANT’s hardware capabilities into base libraries (OpenBLAS, Eigen, numpy) and AI frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, llama.cpp, vllm) - Get code accepted into upstream repositories and package managers so that default installations support Q.ANT hardware out of the box - and maintain it long-term - Serve as Q.ANT’s focal point for open-source software projects - build trust, demonstrate reliability, and represent Q.ANT professionally in development communities such as the PyTorch community - Guide ecosystem partners of Q.ANT on design, development, upstreaming, and maintenance of their code and packages; deliver technical briefings and training to partners and internal teams - Enhance the common native photonic standard library, ensuring frictionless, vendor-agnostic use across the software ecosystem - Align closely with internal teams - algorithms, compiler, device control, infrastructure, system architecture - and bridge external community requirements back into Q.ANT’s development roadmap About us Who we are and what we do Q.ANT is a deep-tech scale-up developing photonic processing solutions that compute natively with light and deliver a scalable alternative to transistor-based systems. The analog co-processors are optimised for complex computations and enable energy-efficient performance for next-generation AI and HPC applications. In collaboration with the Institute for Microelectronics Stuttgart IMS CHIPS, Q.ANT operates its own pilot line for photonic chips, based on the material system Thin-Film Lithium Niobate TFLN. Q.ANT was founded by Michael Förtsch in 2018 and is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany.