About

Hi there! – I’m Lewin, owner of this little website. I’m living in Switzerland, working for Zurich Instruments on the software stack for quantum computing control systems. Fortunately, that is the best thing I can currently imagine working on, and I’m having great fun!

What came before

My career started right after high school, when I joined Google in Zürich (Switzerland) back in 2014, and worked for four years as Systems Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering (sre.google). There, I took care of Google Docs, Google Drive, and later, Borg – the global computing grid that all of Google runs on. Although it was my dream job, I left it in 2018 – to fulfill my long-held dream of studying physics.

At RWTH Aachen, in the very west of Germany, I’ve enjoyed not only a challenging education, but also a multi-disciplinary environment, allowing me to work on projects like robotics software (at IGMR), literal Space Lasers (MERLIN, at Fraunhofer ILT), and teaching Python to other students. Most recently, I worked in Prof. Goettsche’s group on Nuclear Verification and Disarmament (NVD), where I extended my bachelor’s thesis and investigated the applicability of Automatic Differentiation (AD) for simulation applications in nuclear weapons & peace research.

2021 to 2023, I was enrolled in the Physics master’s program at RWTH Aachen. I took the Nanoelectronics track, combining condensed matter physics with information technology. My studies were partially funded by the German Academic Scholarship foundation, the most prestigious scholarship program in the country.

In 2022, I’ve spent a few months in California at UC Davis. This stay was funded by the Studienstiftung. Right after, I started working on my master’s thesis on Silicon Integrated Photonics for WDM in Cryogenic Environments under Prof. Leuthold (ETHZ, Institute of Electromagnetic Fields IEF) and Prof. Barends (FZJ) at ETH Zürich, finishing my degree in fall 2023. Silicon photonics is a fascinating area, and I am fortunate enough to have had a project covering the whole process: from device calculation, design, simulation through fabrication in a cleanroom all the way to characterizing the devices. The results of my work may one day be used in quantum computers for delivering signals to qubits.

In fall 2023, I joined Zurich Instruments AG, a subsidiary of Rohde & Schwarz (Munich), and develops quantum computing control systems and digital lock-in amplifiers - both are high-precision measurement devices used in many physics and electronics labs for measuring the tiniest effects in experimental setups, whether that’s qubits, superconductors, or sensor technology. My coworkers and I work hard on breaking new ground in scaling quantum computing experiments, in terms of scale, latency, and usability. On an every-day basis, this involves high-performance networking software in C++ and Rust, covering large parts of the quantum computing stack from user-facing software, maintenance interfaces and system architecture, down to FPGA and firmware. The special joy I found here is doing things ourselves that many other companies would get off the shelf; this aligns with my belief that there is a special power in doing things yourself, contrary to the “best practice” drum constantly being beaten. If you know what you do, it pays off to do things differently :-)

In spring 2026, I joined QRT, doing similar work in a very different industry. QRT is an “alternative asset manager”, also known as hedge fund. In line with industry norms, I’m afraid I can’t tell you too much about what I’m doing there, though. If you’re really interested, there’s some bits of public information you’ll be able to find.

When not busy at work, I like going out for hiking, cycling, and paragliding - the three best ways to explore the mountains, in my opinion! If I take along my camera, you can see the results in the photos section.