William Zeng
Partner at Normal Computing
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Zeng is a partner at Quantonation and a seasoned quantum computing engineer and investor with 12 years of experience building hardware-aware software, leading product teams, and seeding early-stage physics/compute startups. He founded and runs the Unitary Foundation to support public goods in quantum tech while serving on multiple boards advancing on‑chip memory, large‑scale qubit architectures, and laser-plasma accelerators. Previously he led Advanced Computing R&D at Goldman Sachs and was an early engineer at Rigetti, shipping software to control superconducting processors and contributing to notable open-source projects like pyQuil and Mitiq. With a PhD in computer science from Oxford and a BSc in physics from Yale, he blends deep academic research in quantum architecture and foundations with hands-on algorithm and tooling work—often focused on error mitigation and compiler/runtime improvements that bridge theory to runnable quantum systems.
12 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at University of OxfordHigh School, High School at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and TechnologyBachelor of Science (BSc), Physics, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Physics at Yale University
Github Skills (12)
error-reporting10
quantum-computing10
error-handling10
test-framework10
qiskit10
quil10
python10
testing10
setuptools9
py9
unit-testing9
documentation3
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
rigetti/pyquil
Jan 2017 - Mar 2019
A Python library for quantum programming using Quil.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 70 commits, 79 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the pyQuil library, focusing on improving the core functionality. They removed a Sphinx extension, implemented a `.pop` method for instruction handling, and added corresponding tests. Additionally, the user merged a branch related to running Quil scripts and made substantial modifications to Pauli algebra-related files, including the implementation of a Meyer-Penny game example. This demonstrates the user's involvement in both program structure and quantum computing algorithm design within the library.
python-librarypythonquantum-computingquantumquantum-programming
unitaryfoundation/mitiq
Feb 2020 - Jan 2021
Mitiq is an open source toolkit for implementing error mitigation techniques on most current intermediate-scale quantum computers.
Role in this project:Backend & QA Engineer
Backend & QA EngineerContributions:15 reviews, 46 commits, 47 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the testing framework of the project, specifically adding support for testing with the PyQuil and Qiskit frameworks. The user implemented and tested error mitigation techniques within these frameworks. Furthermore, the user updated the project's build configurations, including versioning and dependencies, suggesting a role in quality assurance and build processes.
computersprototypequantum-programmingqiskitintermediate
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