Dave Bacon
Director at CIFAR
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Bacon is a director-level software and quantum computing leader with 14 years of experience building production-ready quantum software and steering technical teams at Google and IonQ. He led the launch of Google's quantum computing service and has deep hands-on experience across the stack—from core simulator implementations in the widely used open-source Cirq framework to test automation and serialization improvements that sped up development. An academic at heart, he maintains affiliate professorships and an associate fellowship at CIFAR, blending grant-winning research and teaching with product delivery. He helped IonQ navigate a public transaction as VP of Software, showing he can translate research into commercial and regulatory milestones. Known as a self-described "theoretical ski bum turned quantum pseudo professor turned coder," he pairs rigorous physics training (PhD Berkeley, BS Caltech) with pragmatic engineering and a taste for unexpected career pivots.
14 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Physics, Ph.D. Physics at University of California, BerkeleyCalifornia Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
101reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
circuit10
simulation10
unit-testing10
python10
simulator10
simulations10
numpy10
quantum-computing10
documentation10
test-framework9
pytest9
sdk3
jupyter-notebook3
quantum-chemistry3
algorithms3
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
quantumlib/Cirq
Jan 2018 - Jul 2022
Python framework for creating, editing, and running Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) circuits.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:332 reviews, 349 commits, 555 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dave contributed to the development of the project by implementing core simulator functionalities. This includes adding a multi-processing simulator for the xmon native gates, fixing test failures, and contributing to test speed. The user also developed new features such as a function to get valid density matrix, and added a mechanism to serialize and deserialize data, which improves the usability and versatility of the simulator.
pythonnisqquantum-algorithmsquantum-computingcirq
quantumlib/OpenFermion
Sep 2017 - Oct 2017
Python package for compiling and analyzing quantum algorithms to simulate electronic structures.
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:9 commits, 1 PR, 6 pushes in 22 days
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the project by updating the README.rst file. These changes included removing and then adding author information, adding badges for Travis CI, Coveralls, PyPI, and the Python version. These edits significantly improve the project's documentation and provide essential information to potential users and contributors.
pythonquantum-algorithmsquantum-computingquantum-chemistryquantum-programming-language
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