Quantum mechanics is a century-old theory that successfully describes counterintuitive phenomena of the microscopic world. Phenomena that, until not so long ago, would be considered irrelevant for the “real”, macroscopic world. Quantum technologies are, however, nowadays providing a paradigm shift in this thinking: They offer a wealth of potentially revolutionary applications that could change the field of Information and Communication Technology and lead to tremendous breakthroughs in disciplines such as medicine and chemistry. But building functional quantum technologies requires, among others, the ability to precisely manipulate any quantum state, a task that we are currently not able to perform to the required degree. In this talk, I will present a very general framework based on the Magnus expansion that allow one to design high-efficiency control sequences that are fully compatible with experimental constraints on available interactions and their tunability. I will then discuss how these methods can be used to generate fast, high-fidelity gates for a superconducting qubits.