Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

IonQ, a leader in quantum computing, as a Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer. In this deeply hands-on role, you will own the backend services that provide real-time visibility into networks and help secure them against quantum threats. You will design and ship production backend services, build high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines, develop APIs, and implement time-series storage. You will also own service reliability, participate in on-call rotation, and contribute to cloud-native infrastructure. The ideal candidate has 12+ years of backend software engineering experience, strong fundamentals in distributed systems, and proficiency in Go and/or Rust.

Collaboration with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into 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

• Conception, development, and maintenance of backend services, including ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, and device management.
• Ownership of service reliability end-to-end, including participation in on-call rotation, leading incident response, and driving systemic improvements.

Requirements

• 12+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a strong record of shipping production services at scale
• 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
• Experience with cloud-native deployment: containerization (Docker), Kubernetes orchestration, and operating services across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing tradeoffs
• Solid experience building and operating distributed data systems: event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), time-series databases, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines
• 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
• Proven, hands-on proficiency in Go and/or Rust — you write these languages regularly and can demonstrate production systems you have built with them
• 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

Preferred

• Experience working in or adjacent to regulated, security-conscious environments (FedRAMP, NIST, or equivalent)

USD 216,136 - 282,978