An interview with Alex Whitmore, VP of Engineering
What is your role at Monarch Quantum?
As VP of Engineering, I have overall responsibility for the design, development, and support of R&D projects at Monarch. This role includes working hard to understand our customers’ requirements, and then translate them into our technology and product roadmaps. That means I sit at the intersection of every technical discipline—lasers, electro-optics, acousto-optics, fiber-optics, opto-mechanics, software, firmware, optical, robotics, and manufacturing—to ensure we’re aligned around customer goals.
When we talk about our systems engineering capabilities, this is what we mean: the ability to successfully manage large, complex systems using a truly multidisciplinary approach that considers hardware, firmware, software, integration, and manufacturing throughout the entire product life cycle.
What is systems engineering at Monarch Quantum and why does it matter for quantum subassemblies?
Systems engineering is a multidisciplinary approach that tightly aligns all technical disciplines—from system architecture design through integration. As part of our process, we think carefully about integration early, monitor risk continuously, and plan deliberately for the full product life cycle.
In addition to a rigorous process of developing functional requirements with our customers, our approach integrates system quality attributes, or “-ilities”, into our product lifecycle management process. This includes non-functional requirements such as manufacturability, reliability, availability, maintainability, serviceability, and many others that are required for complex commercial products in the field.
This is critical for our quantum customers, who depend on predictable performance and reliability. Today’s hardware can be incredibly complex and disjointed. Tracing failures across components from multiple suppliers simply isn’t scalable if we want to realize quantum’s full potential.
When we developed our core Quantum Light Engine technology, we made sure the photonics hardware lives within a compact, monolithic design with integrated testing. That creates a modular, predictable, and fully traceable system.
Our goal is simple: we want customers to stop turning a wrench on photonics hardware and focus instead on their end applications.
What is the most challenging aspect of what you do?
No single person can anticipate every challenge, roadblock, or tradeoff in a multidisciplinary environment. That’s why having the right team is everything.
When we hire engineers, we’re not just looking for technical excellence, we’re looking for collaborators and innovators. People who can work across functions, understand customer goals, and think about how to future-proof the technology.
Another challenge is balancing innovation with present-day needs. We’re building to meet current requirements, but we also know our customers are designing for commercial-scale systems. That forces us to constantly ask, “How do we obsolete ourselves?”
The only way to do that well is by staying closely engaged with customers—gathering requirements and proactively anticipating how our photonics engines must evolve.
How do you know when you and your team have been successful?
At the end of the day, our success is directly tied to the success of our customers. Our role in the quantum ecosystem is to streamline the integration of photonics into quantum systems.
We know we’ve done our job when, during a design review, a customer realizes we didn’t just give them another laser to integrate. We delivered an integrated photonic system designed to meet their requirements.
You can see it in the conversation, they feel supported. They feel served. That’s when we know we’ve hit the mark.
When you aren’t working, what are you doing?
When I am not at Monarch, you’ll find me playing tennis, swimming in the ocean, teaching my two kids how to be good humans, and exploring the world with my family.