PhD 2001 in physics, working on quantum computation. Postdocs at Caltech and Santa Fe Institute, then landed a research faculty position at the University of Washington. Yeah, raise your own funds! Jumped ship in 2011 (burnout, quality of life, university not caring about quantum computing) and went off to become a "real" software engineer at Google. Worked on ads (as one does), then helped build Google Domains, then worked on distributed privacy preserving machine learning. About two years ago, my background in quantum computing caught back up to me, and now I run the team that builds software for Google's quantum computers.

People ask how to get into quantum computing if you are a software engineer. I will say that you really need to spend some deep time in quantum computing, either a masters or a PhD or some very very serious self study. There are certainly parts of writing software for quantum computing that don't require that, but if you really want an expansive career working in quantum computers you'll want to have a deep background.