IonQ
Staff Distributed Systems Engineer
Santa Clara, California, United States · Staff+ · Contract
Sponsorship not specified$188k-$246kDetected 9 hours ago
GoDistributed SystemsBackend DevelopmentCode ReviewSQLAWSGCPAzureDockerKubernetesTerraformCI/CDPrometheusGrafanaRESTgRPCKafkaData EngineeringIncident ResponseFinancial ModelingLogisticsSystems EngineeringCiscoNetwork Monitoring
About the role
- 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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 8+ 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.
- 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).
- experience with schema design and query optimization.
Nice to have
- 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.
- 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).
- We empower employees to thrive by fostering a culture of autonomy, productivity, and respect.
- US Technical Jobs.
Skills
- In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
- IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before.
- event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), time-series databases, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines.
Compensation
- Posted base salary figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available.
Benefits
- Design and ship production backend services in Go and/or Rust, measured by code quality, test coverage, and on-time delivery of service milestones.
- will vary based on individual factors such as education, qualifications, and experience of the final candidate(s), specific
- 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.
- We are committed to equity and justice.
- office location, and calibration against relevant market data and internal team equity.
Company info
- We are looking for a deeply hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to join the team building IonQ's Network and Security Platform.
Visa & Work Authorization
- export control and government contract restrictions
This listing is sourced directly from IonQ's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.