Methods, systems, and apparatus for designing a quantum control trajectory for implementing a quantum gate using quantum hardware. In one aspect, a method includes the actions of representing the quantum gate as a sequence of control actions and applying a reinforcement learning model to iteratively adjust each control action in the sequence of control actions to determine a quantum control trajectory that implements the quantum gate and reduces leakage, infidelity and total runtime of the quantum gate to improve its robustness of performance against control noise during the iterative adjustments.