QuEra’s SVP of Engineering, Dean Bogdanovic, is a network engineer who spent three decades in the networking trenches before stepping into the quantum world. In this and future posts, Dean will show how lessons from building and scaling the Internet can guide the transition of quantum computing from lab experiments to production systems. Here's what he shared:

I spent 30 years building the plumbing of the Internet—routers, switches, the unsexy infrastructure that makes everything work. Now I'm applying those same lessons to quantum computers.

As quantum hardware shifts from lab curiosities to commercially-valuable, production-grade machines, it’s hitting the same growing pains that once shaped the Internet—the most complex thing humans have ever built. And just like routers, switches, and silicon backplanes quietly stitched together the web we live on, quantum systems will need the same hardened playbook: reliable software, deep observability, and tools that put users first. The recent papers on continuous uptime and fault-tolerant control lay out a familiar blueprint—carve the system into modular units, automate the healing loops, and surface interfaces that abstract away the quantum complexity without hiding the power underneath.  

After decades in the router business, I effectively teleported from ASIC blueprints to atom traps overnight. Switching from routers to qubits has been both humbling and invigorating. The day-to-day went from debugging line-card firmware to building tools that choreograph quantum pulse sequences; instead of optimizing packet flows, I’m now wrangling qubit superpositions; and where I once crafted CLI scripts, I’m now studying magic state distillation recipes—turning noisy quantum “potions” into high-fidelity gate fuel.

The physics layer feels radically different, science-fictional to some, but beneath the physics, the same vendor-grade engineering playbook holds strong: layered architectures, orchestration at scale, fault containment, and modular upgrades still apply. Nine months in, I can’t wait to see how the “quantum systems” we engineer today will power tomorrow’s computing fabric.

For engineers entering quantum, my advice is simple: trust the instincts honed in classical systems engineering—abstractions, modularity, and observability remain your best tools. Use these insights to bring rigor to the chaos—without overcomplicating what’s already complex. The traps to avoid are reinventing every wheel and underestimating the physics—respect both the novelty and the continuity, and you’ll find your footing faster than you think.

For readers looking to go deeper, key works include Gottesman’s foundational fault-tolerant quantum computation and the recent demonstration of real-time fault-tolerance on a neutral-atom platform in Fault-tolerant quantum computation with a neutral atom processor (2024) (arXiv). On the continuous operations side, see Fast, continuous and coherent atom replacement in a neutral atom qubit array (2025), which pioneers uninterrupted atom reloading mid-circuit—a big step toward “zero-deadtime” quantum operation (arXiv). Additionally, Fault-tolerant optical interconnects for neutral-atom arrays (2024) explores modular photonic links that enable scalable, fault-tolerant connectivity across quantum modules (arXiv).