SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 212,000 - 265,000 / annual
IonQ is a quantum computing platform company (NYSE: IONQ) building integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. The company has achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity and operates globally with headquarters in College Park, Maryland.
You will join the team building IonQ's Network and Security Platform as a Principal Distributed Systems Engineer. This is a hands-on architect role responsible for setting technical direction and end-to-end architecture of the platform's distributed backend, including ingestion pipelines, event streaming and telemetry processing, time-series and data storage layers, and APIs that provide operators real-time visibility into networks and quantum-safe intelligence.
Key responsibilities include:
**Platform Architecture & Technical Direction**: Define and own the multi-year architecture and technical roadmap for the distributed backend. Lead architecture reviews and author design standards and decision records. Identify systemic reliability, scalability, security, or architectural gaps and drive cross-team initiatives to resolve them. Partner with product, security, and engineering leadership to translate business requirements into architecture decisions and delivery plans.
**Distributed Data & Streaming Systems**: Architect high-throughput ingestion and telemetry pipelines that reliably collect data from large network device fleets (gNMI/gRPC, NETCONF, SNMP streams). Design event streaming architectures using Kafka or Kinesis with well-defined delivery semantics, schema enforcement, and backpressure handling. Define time-series and storage strategy (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or equivalent). Design RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform data to internal and external consumers.
**Hands-On Engineering**: Build production-quality services, prototypes, and reference implementations in Go and/or Rust. Review critical designs and code across teams to ensure correctness, performance, and operability.
**Reliability, Security & Operations**: Establish observability architecture (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus). Define multi-tenant isolation, access control, and data-governance patterns. Guide incident response for complex production issues and drive systemic improvements.
**Cloud-Native Infrastructure**: Set multi-cloud deployment architecture for containerized workloads on Kubernetes with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
**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 cross-organizational technical authority on distributed systems and data infrastructure.
Travel up to 15% (domestic or international) is required.
**Requirements:**
- 15+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed backend systems and platforms at scale, or equivalent combination of education and experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Demonstrated record as a hands-on architect defining architecture and multi-year roadmap for large-scale distributed platforms and driving them 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 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 ability to explain complex architecture tradeoffs to engineering and business audiences
**Preferred Qualifications:**
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or 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 network equipment vendor or network management company (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, Nokia)
- Experience with graph databases or graph data models for network topology (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
