Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

About IonQ: 

IonQ, Inc. [NYSE: IONQ] is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services,andAstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.

Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our quantum computing services are available through all major cloud providers, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before.  

Location: This role is based onsite at our office in Santa Clara, CA.

Travel: Up to 15%  domestic or international.

Job ID: 1720 

The Role: 

We are looking for a deeply hands-on Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to join the team building IonQ’s Network and Security Platform. You will own the backend services - ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, device management - that give operators real-time visibility into their networks and the intelligence to make them quantum-safe. This is infrastructure that matters: the systems you build will underpin IonQ’s mission to secure the world’s networks against quantum threats.

In this role, you will own backend services end-to-end - from high-throughput ingestion pipelines collecting telemetry from large device fleets, to time-series storage, real-time processing engines, and the APIs that surface platform data to the rest of the organization. You are a deeply hands-on engineer who writes production-quality Go and/or Rust daily, takes pride in operational ownership, and brings strong distributed systems fundamentals to every problem you tackle.

You will partner with and at times drive platform architecture decisions alongside the Principal Architect, setting technical direction for the platform and influencing how IonQ's engineering org approaches distributed systems problems more broadly. The ideal candidate has direct experience building data-intensive backend systems at scale - and is energized by the challenge of making complex infrastructure simple, observable, and dependable.

Responsibilities:

Backend Services & Production Code

• Design and ship production backend services in Go and/or Rust, measured by code quality, test coverage, and on-time delivery of service milestones.
• Build and maintain high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines using gNMI, NETCONF, and SNMP, ensuring reliable data collection across large device fleets.
• Develop RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform data to internal consumers and external integrations, evaluated by uptime, latency SLAs, and adoption by downstream teams.

Data Engineering & Storage

• Implement and evolve the time-series storage layer (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or equivalent), optimizing for query performance, retention policies, and data fidelity under production load.
• Build event streaming pipelines using Kafka or Kinesis with at-least-once or exactly-once semantics, validated through integration tests and production monitoring.
• Design data partitioning and archival strategies that sustain target ingest volumes while meeting defined latency and durability SLAs.

Platform Reliability & Operations

• Own service reliability end-to-end - participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response, and drive systemic improvements tracked via post-mortems and reduction in repeat incidents.
• Instrument all services with structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) so that production issues can be diagnosed and resolved within defined SLOs.
• Identify systemic reliability, scalability, or architectural gaps across the platform - not just within your service area - and drive org-wide initiatives to resolve them. 

Cloud-Native Infrastructure

• Package and deploy services as containerized workloads on Kubernetes, maintaining infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) across AWS, GCP, and Azure environments.
• Contribute to multi-cloud deployment patterns that meet platform availability targets and data residency requirements.

Collaboration & Engineering Quality

• Partner with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into tested, production-grade implementations with clear engineering specifications.
• Define the engineering standards, code review culture, and mentorship frameworks for the platform team; coach Staff and Senior engineers; and act as a cross-organizational technical resource for distributed systems and data infrastructure questions across IonQ. 

Requirements:

• 12+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a strong record of shipping production services at scale.
• Proven, hands-on proficiency in Go and/or Rust - you write these languages regularly and can demonstrate production systems you have built with them.
• Solid experience building and operating distributed data systems: event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), time-series databases, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing tradeoffs.
• Experience with cloud-native deployment: containerization (Docker), Kubernetes orchestration, and operating services across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Familiarity with observability tooling - structured logging, metrics (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry or equivalent).
• Comfortable writing SQL and working with both relational and time-series data models; experience with schema design and query optimization.
• Strong engineering practices including TDD, code review, CI/CD, and on-call ownership - plus a demonstrated track record of defining and evangelizing these practices at the organizational level across multiple teams or companies. 
• Established record of setting technical direction at the organizational level - shaping how engineering teams across IonQ approach distributed systems and infrastructure problems, beyond a single team or domain.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with network telemetry protocols (gNMI, NETCONF, SNMP) or prior work at a network equipment vendor or network management platform company (e.g., Juniper, Cisco, Nokia).
• Hands-on experience with graph databases or graph data models for network topology (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or custom adjacency representations).
• Familiarity with YANG data modeling or prior experience working with device configuration schemas in network management contexts.
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS backend services with strong data isolation and per-tenant resource management.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, observability, or networking projects; or published technical writing on distributed systems topics.
• Experience working in or adjacent to regulated, security-conscious environments (FedRAMP, NIST, or equivalent).

The approximate base salary range for this position is $216,136- $282,978. The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.

Compensation will vary based on individual factors such as education, qualifications, and experience of the final candidate(s), specific office location, and calibration against relevant market data and internal team equity. Posted base salary figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. Our benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, matching 401(k), unlimited PTO and paid holidays, parental/adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided when a candidate receives an offer of employment. 

At IonQ, we believe in fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all while striving to identify and eliminate barriers. We empower employees to thrive by fostering a culture of autonomy, productivity, and respect. We are dedicated to creating an environment where individuals can feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued.

We are committed to equity and justice. We welcome different voices and viewpoints and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ancestry, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.

US Technical Jobs.  The position you are applying for will require access to technology that is subject to U.S. export control and government contract restrictions.  Employment with IonQ is contingent on either verifying “U.S. Person” (e.g., U.S. citizen, U.S. national, U.S. permanent resident, or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum) status for export controls and government contracts work, obtaining any necessary license, and/or confirming the availability of a license exception under U.S. export controls.  Please note that in the absence of confirming you are a U.S. Person for export control and government contracts work purposes, IonQ may choose not to apply for a license or decline to use a license exception (if available) for you to access export-controlled technology that may require authorization, and similarly, you may not qualify for government contracts work that requires U.S. Persons, and IonQ may decline to proceed with your application on those bases alone.  Accordingly, we will have some additional questions regarding your immigration status that will be used for export control and compliance purposes, and the answers will be reviewed by compliance personnel to ensure compliance with federal law.  

US Non-Technical Jobs.  Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum. Accordingly, we will have some additional questions regarding your immigration status that will be used for export control and compliance purposes, and the answers will be reviewed by compliance personnel to ensure compliance with federal law.

If you are interested in being a part of our team and mission, we encourage you to apply!