Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

IonQ, a leader in quantum computing, as a Senior 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 also own service reliability, instrument all services, and contribute to multi-cloud deployment patterns. The ideal candidate has 6+ years of backend software engineering experience, strong proficiency in Go and/or Rust, and experience with distributed data systems.

Responsibilities

• You will design and ship production backend services, build high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines, develop APIs, and implement a time-series storage layer.
• Concevoir et expédier des services backend de production en Go et/ou Rust, mesurés par la qualité du code, la couverture des tests et le respect des délais de livraison.
• Construire et maintenir des pipelines d'ingestion de télémétrie à haut débit en utilisant gNMI, NETCONF et SNMP, en garantissant une collecte de données fiable.
• Développer des API RESTful et gRPC qui exposent les données de la plateforme aux consommateurs internes et aux intégrations externes, évaluées par la disponibilité, les SLA de latence.

Requirements

• 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
• 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
• Strong engineering practices: test-driven or test-informed development, code review, CI/CD, and operational ownership including on-call
• 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
• Familiarity with observability tooling — structured logging, metrics (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry or equivalent)
• Experience with cloud-native deployment: containerization (Docker), Kubernetes orchestration, and operating services across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Comfortable writing SQL and working with both relational and time-series data models; experience with schema design and query optimization
• 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 163,430 - 213,972