Blake Johnson
Distinguished Engineer at IBM
Town of Yorktown, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBlake Johnson is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM with 17+ years in quantum computing and a PhD in Physics from Yale, known for bridging deep research with production systems that scale. He led control architecture and Qiskit Runtime efforts that enabled dynamic circuits and higher-performance quantum queries, and helped demonstrate early quantum advantage in machine learning. Prior roles include VP of Quantum Engineering at Rigetti and leading low-latency control and AWG innovations at Raytheon/BBN, where he transitioned research into commercial products and holds related IP. An active open-source contributor, he has improved REPL and optimization tooling in the widely used Julia ecosystem and helped refine the OpenQASM specification, reflecting both low-level firmware expertise and developer-facing tooling fluency.
17 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Physics, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Physics at Harvard UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics at Yale University
Github Skills (19)
keymaps10
lang10
keymapping10
repr10
specification10
replit10
documentation10
optimization10
julia10
restructuredtext9
data-structure9
programming-language9
algorithm9
algorithms9
rs9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
openqasm/openqasm
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
Quantum assembly language for extended quantum circuits
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:305 reviews, 73 commits, 72 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Blake's contributions focused primarily on updating and enhancing the documentation within the OpenQASM repository. They added a contributors section to the introduction, updated affiliations, and restored missing code blocks, specifically in the 'types', 'gates', 'comments', 'insts', 'classical', 'subroutines', 'pulses', and 'delays' sections. They also addressed inconsistencies and fixed formatting issues, ensuring clarity and accuracy in the documentation. These edits demonstrate a focus on improving the readability and completeness of the OpenQASM language specification.
assembly-languagequantum-circuitsquantum-computingcircuitsextended
JuliaLang/julia
Dec 2012 - Aug 2016
The Julia Programming Language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:89 commits, 23 PRs, 50 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the `LineEdit.jl` file, focusing on improving the REPL's behavior and functionality within the Julia programming language. The commits demonstrate efforts to refine keymap behavior, including up/down arrow navigation, prefix search, and escape sequence handling. The user also implemented fixes for reported issues, like #6377, #8446, #8468, #9412, #10222, #10397, and #12254.
sciencejulia-languagemachine-learningjulialangpetsc
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.