Quantum Workforce Intelligence from qubitsok.com with Piotr Lewandowski

Piotr Lewandowski is a software engineer based in Poland who, as a side project, has built something that no well-funded research institute has: a continuously updated, ontology-tagged intelligence platform that ingests the entire quant-ph archive, tracks thousands of open quantum roles across hundreds of companies, parses patents and grants and open-source repositories, and links all of it to individual researcher profiles. He is not a tenured academic or a hardware engineer. He is an independent data practitioner, and that outsider position gives him a vantage point on the quantum workforce that insiders rarely have — or rarely share.

This conversation matters now because the quantum industry is simultaneously claiming a generational workforce opportunity and struggling to fill highly specialized roles. Lewandowski's data offers a rare ground-truth check on both claims. If you work in quantum hiring, research, policy, or investment — or if you're a student trying to understand what the field actually looks like from the outside — this episode will give you a more honest picture than almost anything else currently available.

What We Get Into

• How qubitsok's 500-tag ontology was built from scratch — why Lewandowski chose a tree-structured, parent-child tag system rather than relying on existing academic metadata infrastructure, and how it steers AI toward the most specific and useful classification rather than broad category labels.
• What the full quant-ph corpus reveals about researcher mobility — which countries are gaining quantum talent (Germany and China are notable winners) and which are losing it (the US and Australia are among the top brain-drain sources), based on tracking affiliation changes over time in published papers.
• The rising share of industry authorship in quantum research — industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026, and what that structural shift might mean for what gets published — and what doesn't.
• Why the platform tracks open-source contributions alongside papers — when researchers join industry and their publication rate drops, their open-source activity becomes a meaningful proxy for continued technical engagement, and qubitsok indexes both.
• The "qubie" talent-matching tool Lewandowski is building — rather than keyword overlap, qubie dispatches sub-agents to extract specific, claim-level evidence from a researcher's papers, dissertations, and other public writing, then returns a structured profile and interview guide for each candidate.
• Why sourcing quantum talent is a fundamentally different problem than general tech recruiting — the evidence of what a quantum researcher can actually do is largely public and published, but no one has had the infrastructure to read it systematically at scale until now.
• The two product directions Lewandowski is weighing — analytics and competitive intelligence for investors and companies versus talent matching for quantum hiring — and why he's currently prioritizing the latter.
• What it means to build a field-level intelligence platform as an outsider — Lewandowski is neither employed by a quantum company nor affiliated with a university, and that independence shapes both what he can see and what he can say.

Resources & Links

Guest Links

• qubitsok.com — The platform itself: quantum job board, daily arXiv paper digest with semantic tagging, and researcher collaboration search. All free for researchers and job seekers.
• qubitsok.com/collaborate — Search for quantum researchers by expertise, ontology tag, and affiliation — useful for finding collaborators or co-authors.
• Piotr Lewandowski on LinkedIn — The best place to reach him directly, especially if you're a company interested in early access to the qubie talent-matching product.
• Piotr Lewandowski on YouTube — His channel covering quantum computing job market analysis and platform updates.

Papers & Reports

• EPJ Quantum Technology — "The quantum technology job market: data-driven analysis of 3,641 job posts" (March 2026) — Lewandowski's peer-reviewed paper on the quantum job market, the most rigorous published treatment of the data underlying qubitsok.
• 2026 Quantum Computing Salary Report — Analysis of 194 salary data points drawn from real job postings; a useful benchmark for researchers and hiring managers alike.
• Fastest-Growing Quantum Skills 2026 — Lewandowski's analysis of 1,212 quantum jobs and 14,975 papers identifying which technical skills are accelerating and which are declining in the labor market.

Tools & Platforms

• qubitsok.com/jobs — Live quantum job listings, filtered by the platform's 500-tag ontology.
• qubitsok.com/region/europe — Live European quantum jobs market data, useful context for the EU talent and salary discussion.
• qubitsok.com/hire — Information for companies looking to use qubitsok's candidate database and, soon, the qubie matching tool.

Recognition

• Dr. Bob Sutor's "Quantum Follow Friday" (February 27, 2026) — Sutor Group newsletter highlighting Lewandowski as a key quantum community voice worth following; useful context for his growing recognition as an independent analyst.

Key Quotes & Insights

On why the published record is a better hiring signal than a LinkedIn profile: > "Research gives you this unique lens to see people's work before you talk to them. You can be really prepared, and this helps on two sides — you talk to people actually capable of filling the role, and you're not wasting their time asking questions they already answered via their published work."

On what brain-drain data actually shows: > "The biggest country that gained quantum computing talent in the last twenty-four months is Germany — which is not something someone could expect. And the biggest countries getting brain-drained are, interestingly, the United States."

Insight — on the soul-crushing reality of quantum sourcing: Lewandowski's first job in college was sourcing — going through profiles with pen and paper, making cold calls that nobody wanted to receive. His argument is that quantum hiring doesn't have to work that way, because the evidence of what a researcher can do is already public. The problem has never been a lack of signal; it's been a lack of infrastructure to read it.

On the rising share of industry authorship: Industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026 — a structural shift in who is producing the science, with implications for what gets published and what gets quietly redirected into proprietary pipelines.

Insight — on the limits of the data: Lewandowski is consistently careful about w...