Senior Systems Engineering

Senior Distributed Systems EngineerIonQ, Inc. 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, and AstraZeneca 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.This role is based onsite at our office in Santa Clara, CA. Travel: Up to 15% domestic or international.The Role:We are looking for a deeply hands-on Senior 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 work closely with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into reliable, well-tested, production-grade implementations. 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: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.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.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.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.Partner with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into tested, production-grade implementations with clear engineering specifications.Requirements:6+ 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.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; Strong engineering practices: test-driven or test-informed development, code review, CI/CD, and operational ownership including on-call.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., Hands-on experience with graph databases or graph data models for network topology (e.g., 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.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. 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. S. export control and government contract restrictions. S. citizen, 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.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