Oskar Painter received his Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 1994, his Master of Science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2001. In 2000 he helped found Xponent Photonics, an optical start-up company developing surface-mount photonics for telecom and data networking applications. In 2002, he returned to the California Institute of Technology, where he is the John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics.

Prof Painter joined Amazon Web Services in December 2019, to help establish a new effort in quantum computing. He is the Director of Quantum Hardware, leading a team of theoretical and experimental scientists and engineers in the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of real-world application.

Experimental research in the Painter Lab has historically focused on several inter-related topics — superconducting quantum circuits for quantum information processing and communication, the quantum physics of mesoscopic mechanical objects, hybrid superconducting and acoustic quantum circuits, and optomechanical sensors for quantum-limited sensing applications.