Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

The posting, as IonQ wrote it

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, 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.

Location: This role is based onsite at our office in Santa Clara, CA.
Travel: Up to 15% domestic or international.
Job ID: 1722

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

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

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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!