Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

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: 1923 

The Role: 

We are looking for a Principal Distributed Systems Engineer to join the team building IonQ's Network and Security Platform. As a Principal Distributed Systems Engineer, you'll be part of a cross-functional team whose mission is to lead IonQ on its journey to build the world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems — and to secure the world's networks against quantum threats.

In this role, you will be responsible for setting the technical direction and end-to-end architecture of the platform's distributed backend — the ingestion pipelines, event streaming and telemetry processing, time-series and data storage layers, and APIs that give operators real-time visibility into their networks and the intelligence to make them quantum-safe. You will remain hands-on: building reference implementations and proofs of concept, reviewing critical designs and code, and turning architecture decisions into production-grade systems alongside Staff and Senior engineers.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on architect and natural technical leader who has designed and scaled multi-tenant, data-intensive distributed platforms, can align technology choices with business outcomes, and is energized by making complex infrastructure simple, observable, secure, and dependable.

Responsibilities:

Platform Architecture & Technical Direction

• Define and own the multi-year architecture and technical roadmap for the platform's distributed backend, measured by delivery against roadmap milestones and platform availability, scalability, and cost targets.


• Lead architecture reviews and author the design standards, reference architectures, and decision records that guide how the platform — and IonQ's broader engineering organization — approaches distributed systems and data infrastructure problems.


• Identify systemic reliability, scalability, security, or architectural gaps across the platform and drive cross-team initiatives to resolve them.


• Partner with product, security, and engineering leadership to translate business requirements into architecture decisions, clear engineering specifications, and sequenced delivery plans.

Distributed Data & Streaming Systems

• Architect high-throughput ingestion and telemetry pipelines that reliably collect data from large network device fleets (e.g., gNMI/gRPC, NETCONF, SNMP streams).


• Design event streaming architectures using Kafka or Kinesis with well-defined delivery semantics (at-least-once / exactly-once), schema enforcement and evolution, and backpressure handling.


• Define the time-series and storage strategy (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or equivalent), including partitioning, retention, archival, and query performance under production load.


• Design RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform data to internal consumers and external integrations, evaluated by latency SLAs, uptime, and adoption by downstream teams.

Hands-On Engineering

• Build production-quality services, prototypes, and reference implementations in Go and/or Rust (or another production systems language), setting the bar for code quality and test coverage.


• Review critical designs and code across teams to ensure correctness, performance, and operability.

Reliability, Security & Operations

• Establish the observability architecture — structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) — so production issues can be diagnosed and resolved within defined SLOs.


• Define multi-tenant isolation, access control, and data-governance patterns that meet security, compliance, and data residency requirements.


• Guide incident response for complex production issues, participate in on-call escalation, and drive systemic improvements tracked through post-mortems.

Cloud-Native Infrastructure

• Set the multi-cloud deployment architecture for containerized workloads on Kubernetes, with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) across AWS, GCP, and Azure, meeting platform availability and cost targets.

Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor and coach Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff engineers; raise the bar on engineering standards, code review culture, and design practices.


• Act as a cross-organizational technical authority on distributed systems and data infrastructure across IonQ.

Requirements:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed backend systems and platforms at scale, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.


• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.


• Demonstrated record as a hands-on architect: defining the architecture and multi-year roadmap for large-scale distributed platforms and driving them through to production.


• Deep experience designing distributed data systems: event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), high-throughput ingestion pipelines, and time-series or large-scale data stores.


• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing tradeoffs.


• Hands-on proficiency in at least one production systems language (Go, Rust, Java, or Scala), with the ability to build reference implementations and review production code.


• Extensive experience with cloud-native architecture on AWS (GCP or Azure a plus): containerization, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, security, and cost optimization.


• Experience designing multi-tenant platforms with strong data isolation, access control, and governance.


• Experience defining observability and reliability frameworks — logging, metrics, tracing, SLOs — for mission-critical systems.


• Established record of setting technical direction beyond a single team: leading architecture governance, influencing executive stakeholders, and mentoring senior engineers across globally distributed organizations.


• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex architecture tradeoffs to both engineering and business audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.


• Production experience in Go and/or Rust.


• Experience with network telemetry and network management platforms — gNMI/gRPC, NETCONF, SNMP, YANG data models — or prior work at a network equipment vendor or network management company (e.g., Juniper, Cisco, Arista, Nokia).


• Experience with graph databases or graph data models for network topology (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or custom adjacency representations).


• Experience with AI/ML platform infrastructure (MLOps / LLMOps, model governance, agentic workflows) applied to operational or network data.


• Experience in regulated, security-conscious environments (FedRAMP, NIST, or equivalent).


• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, streaming, observability, or networking projects, or published technical writing on distributed systems.

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. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided when a candidate receives an offer of employment. 

At IonQ, we believe in fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all while striving to identify and eliminate barriers. We empower employees to thrive by fostering a culture of autonomy, productivity, and respect. We are dedicated to creating an environment where individuals can feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued.
 
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. 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!