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.

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 what his metrics can and cannot claim. On "rising stars" identified by publication velocity and citations: "I just don't feel strongly enough to say that someone is a rising star based on their citations alone." That epistemic humility is part of what makes the platform trustworthy.

Explore qubitsok.com — The job board, daily paper digest, and researcher collaboration search are all free. If you're a company looking for quantum talent, reach out to Piotr directly on LinkedIn — he's actively building the qubie talent-matching product and looking for early partners.

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