VP of Quantum

VP of Quantum - Diasense ApS

Reports to: Marvin Holten, Founder and CTO

Team: Quantum Lead, Quantum Engineers, and part-time specialists in quantum information science and quantum optics, growing through 2027

Location: Quantum Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark. On-site.

Start: January 2027

Company Overview

Diasense is a deep-tech company turning fundamental quantum physics into world-class scientific instruments. We are building the world's most sensitive magnetic microscope, using nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond to measure magnetic fields at a sensitivity that no other technique can reach.

We are applying that instrument to one of the hardest measurement problems in semiconductor manufacturing: seeing what is actually happening inside a finished chip, electrically and non-destructively. It is a market where the physics has to be exceptional and the engineering has to be industrial, and very few companies in the world are attempting both.

We are a spin-out of DTU Physics, based in the quantum center of Copenhagen, and we are about to move from a working prototype to instruments installed at customers’ sites. The team today is eight full-time and six part-time people. Over 2027 and 2028, we are building that to around thirty. By joining now, you will be one of the people who decide what this company becomes, not someone who inherits it.

Position Overview

Job Description

We are looking for the person who will own the quantum side of our instrument, outright.

You will lead our quantum function: a Quantum Lead, quantum engineers, and part-time specialists, growing over the next eighteen months. You are an experimentalist at heart. We are not looking for someone who manages a lab from a desk. We are looking for the person other physicists go to when something does not work, and nobody can say why. Today that person is our CTO, and your role is to change that. When the quantum work gets stuck, it should stop with you.

You will be joining at the transition point where the instrument moves from lab to customer sites. The physics has to keep improving, and it now also has to withstand contact with the real world. Both halves of that are yours.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Ownership of the Quantum Platform

• Own the performance of the NV-diamond measurement chain end to end: optical read-out, microwave control, sensitivity, noise floor and measurement protocols.
• Set the technical direction for how we push sensitivity and measurement speed over the next two years.
• Make the calls on where the physics effort goes, and be accountable for them.

Hands-on Experimental Work

• Spend the majority of your week in the lab, on the instrument, with your hands on it.
• Diagnose and fix the problems that have no procedure attached - the ones where the measurement is wrong and nobody yet knows why.
• Develop and prove new experimental protocols, rather than reviewing someone else's.

Leading and Building the Quantum Team

• Lead the quantum function: our Quantum Lead, quantum engineers and part-time academic specialists, with further hires planned through 2027.
• Raise what the team can do unaided. Success looks like fewer problems reaching you over time, not more.
• Own hiring for the quantum team as it grows, together with the CTO.

Instruments in the Field

• Take technical responsibility for the quantum performance of instruments installed at customer sites.
• Support and eventually supervise measurement campaigns at customer locations, so that deployment does not depend on the founders.
• Work closely with instrumentation, software and applications colleagues - this instrument only works when all four disciplines agree.

Qualifications & Experience

• A PhD in Physics, Quantum Optics, Atomic Physics or a closely related field, followed by substantial further experimental experience in academia or industry.
• Deep, sustained, hands-on experimental physics. Years at the bench, building and debugging experiments yourself. This is the single most important qualification and we will test for it.
• A demonstrable record of solving unfamiliar, hard experimental problems without supervision. We are interested in what you did when the standard approach failed.
• Experience guiding, mentoring or leading other researchers or engineers - formally or informally. You do not need to have held a management title, but you do need to want this half of the job.
• An inquisitive and stubborn mindset: willing to question assumptions, including your own, and to keep going after a problem that has already resisted three attempts.
• Fluency in Python or MATLAB for research-grade data analysis.

Experience with one or more of the following is a significant advantage:

• Cold atoms or trapped ions. Our techniques originate in cold-atom physics rather than in quantum sensing, and we have found that people trained in that tradition tend to carry exactly the debugging instinct this role needs.
• Magnetometry, especially with NV centres, and precision measurements.
• Microwave electronics and real-time control systems.
• Building complex free-space optical systems from components.
• Taking a laboratory technique out of the laboratory.

Compensation & Benefits

• A competitive salary package.
• An attractive warrant package. You will share directly in what you build, and at this stage the share is meaningful.
• Relocation support for you and your family, and assistance with the Danish researcher tax scheme, which for qualifying international hires taxes salary at a flat 32.84 percent for up to seven years.
• Denmark's quantum ecosystem at your door: DTU Physics, the Niels Bohr Institute and one of Europe's densest concentrations of quantum research.
• A small, senior team where decisions are made in a conversation rather than in a process.

USP's for this job

• You are the ceiling, not waiting for one. In most companies, the deepest technical authority sits above you, and you work within it. Here you are being hired to become it. The quantum direction of this instrument will be yours.
• Lead a team without leaving the lab. Almost every physicist who moves into leadership loses the bench. This role is explicitly designed so that you do not - the leadership comes from being the best experimentalist, not from stopping being one.
• Build the Unprecedented: You will be a leading the development and rollout of the most powerful magnetic microscope in the world, directly pushing the boundaries of scientific measurement.
• It leaves the building. Our instruments are going into customer laboratories. You will see your work measured by whether it survives in somebody else's fab, which is a rarer and more satisfying test than a paper.
• Early enough to matter. Fourteen people today, around thirty by the end of 2028. The people joining now set how this company works.