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Shisheer S Kaushik300 K·Room temperature

300 K · Quantum Systems & Hardware Engineer

Shisheer
S Kaushik

Calibrating, benchmarking and building the system software that turns fragile qubits into a usable QPU.

50 KPT stage 1

Where I work in the stack

From the pulse on the line to the job in the queue.

Portrait of Shisheer S Kaushik

I work at the layer where physics meets software: characterising qubits, closing calibration loops, and benchmarking processors so the numbers people quote actually mean something.

I’m Technical Lead for Quantum Systems Software at QpiAI, leading the stack from SDK and compiler toolchain to the quantum OS/runtime and control firmware. My path ran from RF and antenna design in electronics engineering, through quantum algorithms and error detection, to an M.Tech in Quantum Science & Technology at IIT Jodhpur. I’m a Qiskit Advocate and have mentored 550+ students through QWorld.

Quantum
Qiskit · PennyLane · Strawberry Fields · D-Wave Ocean · Cirq · QuTiP
Languages
Python · C · QASM
Systems
Docker · Git / GitHub Actions · Linux · FastAPI · AWS
ML / MLOps
PyTorch · TensorFlow · scikit-learn · MLflow · ZenML
Optimisation
CPLEX · NetworkX
Hardware / RF
CST Studio · Antenna design
  1. L1

    QPU Calibration

    Automated calibration pipelines — spectroscopy, Rabi / Ramsey, readout discrimination — feeding live device characterisation back into transpilation.

    T₁ / T₂*Rabi · RamseyReadout
  2. L2

    Benchmarking

    Measuring what a processor can really do: randomized benchmarking, cross-entropy and volumetric metrics, and cross-vendor comparisons on real QPUs.

    RB / IRBXEBQuantum VolumeCross-QPU
  3. L3

    Systems Software

    SDK, compiler toolchain, quantum OS / runtime and control firmware — hardware abstraction, native-gate compilation, job scheduling and error mitigation, integrated end to end.

    SDKCompilerQOS / RuntimeFirmware
4 KPT stage 2

Experience

Industry, research, education and the communities that got me here.

  1. May 2024 — nowBengaluru · Remote

    Technical Lead — Quantum Systems Software · QpiAI

    1. Technical Lead, Quantum Systems SoftwareApr 2026 — now
    2. Quantum Engineer, Quantum Systems SoftwareJun 2025 — Apr 2026
    3. Quantum Computing Intern · RemoteJul 2024 — Jun 2025
    4. Quantum Computing Intern · On-site, BengaluruMay 2024 — Jul 2024
    • Leading quantum systems software across the stack — SDK, compiler toolchain, quantum OS / runtime and control firmware — driving end-to-end integration and performance.
    • Built system-integration workflows connecting quantum hardware backends with classical control software, and automated calibration pipelines that feed device noise characterisation back into transpilation.
    • Compiler work: gate decomposition, optimisation passes and IR-level transforms targeting native gate sets; hardware-abstraction interfaces across QPU vendors.
    • As an intern: developed and validated features for QpiAI Opt, contributed QpiAI ML library modules, and built parametric-circuit and simulation components for the QpiAI Quantum SDK.
  2. May 2023 — Jul 2023Bengaluru

    Summer Intern Fellow (SparQ) · QNu Labs

    • Collaborated with a team of seasoned professionals on a browser-based quantum-safe VPN plugin using post-quantum cryptography.
  3. Feb 2023 — Apr 2023Gurgaon

    Junior Researcher · Qkrishi Quantum

    • Developed and evaluated a phase-estimation-based quantum optimisation algorithm for the travelling-salesman and vehicle-routing problems, benchmarked across multiple QPUs.
  4. Aug 2021 — Sep 2021Remote

    Skill India Intern · Elite Techno Groups

    • Built an inventory-management system exchanging structured data as JSON — product tracking, sales analysis and purchase-history statements — plus a product front end.
  5. Jul 2021 — Aug 2021Remote

    Summer School Intern — QIntern 2021 · QWorld

    • Developed a surface-code-based quantum error-detection model; contributed to the QMap resource project.
  6. Jul 2021 — May 2022Bengaluru

    Undergraduate Thesis · Advanced Communication Lab, BNMIT

    • Designed and fabricated a low-cost wearable micro-strip patch antenna for remote health monitoring; published at IEEE IITCEE 2023.

Education

Community & teaching

Qiskit Advocate

2023–now

IBM Quantum

Open-source contributor and mentor: events, Qiskit contributions and educational content for the community.

Academic Mentor & Project Contributor

2021–2022

QWorld

Guided a community of 550+ students; ran QBronze / QSilver workshops, coding sessions and events.

University Lead

2021–2022

WeMakeDevs

Hands-on training tracks in scientific computing.

Developer & Content Writer

2019–2022

Bolt IoT

Tutorials and mentoring in IoT, wireless sensor networks, ML and embedded systems.

800 mKStill

Selected projects

Benchmarks, algorithms and hardware.

HHHHHββββββββββUC(γ₁)UC(γ₂)
2024–25

Quantum Technology in Finance

Master’s thesis, IIT Jodhpur (Dec 2024 – May 2025). QAOA portfolio-optimisation solver for financial knapsack problems with adaptive, warm-start and quantum-walk mixers under realistic noise. Approximation ratio 0.92 (10 stocks) and 0.80 (20 stocks).

QAOANoise modelsFinance
Wearable Micro-strip Patch Antenna — figure
2022

Wearable Micro-strip Patch Antenna

Flexible antenna on jeans textile and FR4 at 2.3 / 2.66 GHz for remote health monitoring — designed, simulated (CST) and fabricated. Published at IEEE IITCEE 2023.

RFCST StudioFabrication
  • 2024

    Circuit Descriptors for Optimising Quantum Models

    Capstone, IIT Jodhpur. How expressibility, entangling capability, parameter variance and dataset characteristics shape the accuracy and scalability of QNNs, QCNNs and QSVMs.

  • 2024

    Quantum Binary Classifier with Custom Ansatz

    QML course project, IIT Jodhpur. Binary classification on citrus and MNIST data with Qiskit’s EstimatorQNN and SamplerQNN, comparing custom encodings and ansatz choices.

  • 2024

    Iris Insight — End-to-End ML Pipeline

    Automated preprocessing, training, evaluation and deployment with ZenML orchestration, MLflow tracking and a Streamlit front end.

  • 2024

    Gene Prioritisation for Type II Diabetes

    Sequence similarity and tensor-based moment-of-inertia embeddings of protein sequences to rank candidate T2DM genes.

  • 2023

    Autism Detection with Quantum Transfer Learning

    Quanvolutional layers inside a classical CNN transfer-learning pipeline for medical images, compared against a classical baseline.

  • 2023

    Android Malware Detection with VQC

    Variational quantum classifier evaluated with SecML as the inference engine for mobile malware detection.

  • 2021

    Quantum Secure Communication via Steganography

    Hiding secret text in a cover file using BB84-style encoding, characterising noise across three hardware backends.

  • 2021

    Quantum QR-Code Generator

    QR codes generated from Bernstein–Vazirani outputs on quantum hardware. 7th place, QC Hack 2021.

  • 2020

    Celebrity Look-alike Model

    CloudxLab internship. dlib face descriptors with Euclidean and Mahalanobis similarity to match portraits to celebrity look-alikes (98.38% similarity).

100 mKCold plate

Publications, talks & notes

Publications

Talks

10 mKMixing chamber

Base temperature

Recognition, and how to reach me.

Honours & certifications

Off-shift · travel photography

Rajasthan, during my IIT Jodhpur years

10 mK · Mixing chamber — where the qubits live

Working on calibration, benchmarking and QPU system software? Let’s talk.