PhD - Quantum Error Correction Codes for Cat Qubits

Location & life at Alice & Bob:

You’ll be based in Paris with English as your working language. We offer a hybrid work arrangement, with flexible remote up to 40% a month, and we make space for the rituals that keep us grounded, from Café Cohez on Mondays to Snacky Day on Wednesdays.

As part of the QuBriC training programme, depending on the advancement of the project, you may have 3 secondments:
Inria (France): fault-tolerant gate protocols and validation under realistic biased noise
TU Delft (Netherlands): experimental benchmarking and integration of biased-noise gate demonstrations
University of Navarra (Spain): modelling and simulation of bias-adapted code performance

Responsibilities:

At Alice & Bob you will:
Develop and benchmark high-rate, biased-noise-adapted QEC codes and corresponding logical-gate protocols using lifted-product and asymmetric-distance constructions
Co-design logical operations (homomorphic CNOT, transversal Clifford, algorithmic subroutines), incorporating noise bias, connectivity, and measurement constraints
Validate designs via hardware-in-the-loop simulations and small-scale cat-qubit experiments, quantifying space–time efficiency and logical error suppression
Benchmark biased-noise performance and decoder compatibility, providing feedback to the network’s architecture and decoder work packages
Contribute to an open online library of high-rate codes and logical protocols for biased-noise qubits, including analysis of resource overhead, and to open datasets/tools for reproducible biased-noise co-design
Publish your results in leading journals and present them at international conferences
Follow the QuBriC doctoral training programme (QEC foundations, coding theory, architectures, decoders, hardware integration), Sorbonne Université doctoral training courses, plus Alice & Bob’s internal courses on biased noise, QEC, and cat qubit hardware
Carry out the secondments and contribute to the network’s outreach and open-science activities

Requirements:

MSc degree in Quantum Engineering or Physics completed by the recruitment date
Demonstrated background in quantum information or quantum computing (coursework, thesis, or research projects visible on your CV)
Proficiency in scientific programming with Python
Proficiency in English (written and oral)
MSCA eligibility - doctoral candidate: you must NOT already hold a doctoral degree hat the date of recruitment
MSCA eligibility - mobility rule: you must not have resided or carried out your main activity (work, studies, etc.) in France for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before your recruitment date (short stays such as holidays and compulsory national service are not counted)
Full-time availability for the 36-month appointment, including the secondments.

We’re also looking for:

Familiarity with quantum error correction - stabilizer formalism, fault-tolerant logic
Familiarity with the physics of cat qubits
Experience with QEC simulation or resource-estimation tooling, and taste for open, reproducible science
Prior research experience in a quantum computing company or lab (internship, research assistantship)