Christopher J. Wood
Software Engineer at Google
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarChristopher J. Wood is a software engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in quantum software and high-performance simulation. Based in Los Angeles, he has been an active contributor to flagship open-source projects in the Qiskit ecosystem, driving backend changes in qiskit, Aer, and enhancements to quantum-algorithm tooling like qiskit-aqua. His work spans core circuit decomposition, simulator internals (including a snapshot engine), and tomography/data-fitting methods—bringing both low-level systems skill and quantitative data-science rigor to quantum software. He pairs technical writing and tutorials with engineering, improving documentation and hands-on examples that make complex quantum concepts accessible. Notably, he has implemented performance-minded simulator features and improved error-mitigation tooling, reflecting a pragmatic focus on making quantum experiments more reliable and reproducible.
11 years of coding experience
Github Skills (19)
algorithm10
simulation10
json10
error-reporting10
c-language10
python10
simulator10
simulations10
user-manual10
cvxpy10
quantum-computing10
error-handling10
qiskit10
cprogramming-language10
linear-algebra10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Qiskit/qiskit-aer
Jul 2018 - Feb 2022
Aer is a high performance simulator for quantum circuits that includes noise models
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:356 reviews, 495 commits, 741 PRs in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Christopher implemented a snapshot engine and updated the operations specifications and JSON parsing. They moved certain operation functions to the circuit methods and refactored the code. They also addressed a bug in tensor indexing and refactored related code to use functions within the Index namespace.
quantum-circuitsquantum-computinggpucircuitsquantum-algorithms
qiskit-community/qiskit-ignis
Jun 2018 - Mar 2021
Ignis (deprecated) provides tools for quantum hardware verification, noise characterization, and error correction.
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:41 reviews, 35 commits, 134 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Christopher was heavily involved in rewriting the Ignis tomography module, focusing on state and process tomography. Their work included implementing various data fitting methods, such as least-squares (lstsq) and convex optimization (cvx), to reconstruct quantum states and processes. The commits demonstrate a strong understanding of quantum information theory and the application of data analysis techniques for quantum information processing. They also worked on error mitigation, incorporating calibration matrices for improved fidelity.
characterizationquantum-computingquantum-algorithmsphotonicsquantum-programming-language
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