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Salary: USD 212,000 - 265,000 / annual
IonQ is the world's leading quantum platform and merchant supplier, delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. The company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity in 2025, setting a world record in quantum computing performance. IonQ serves customers including Amazon Web Services and AstraZeneca, helping them achieve 20x performance results in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense.
We are seeking a Principal Distributed Systems Engineer to join the team building IonQ's Network and Security Platform. In this role, you will set the technical direction and own the 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 give operators real-time visibility into their networks and quantum-safe intelligence.
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. You will define and own the multi-year architecture and technical roadmap, measured by delivery against milestones and platform availability, scalability, and cost targets. You will lead architecture reviews and author design standards, reference architectures, and decision records that guide how the platform and IonQ's broader engineering organization approach distributed systems and data infrastructure problems.
Key responsibilities include architecting high-throughput ingestion and telemetry pipelines that reliably collect data from large network device fleets (gNMI/gRPC, NETCONF, SNMP streams); designing event streaming architectures using Kafka or Kinesis with well-defined delivery semantics, schema enforcement, and backpressure handling; defining time-series and storage strategy (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or equivalent); and designing RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform data to internal and external consumers.
You will establish the observability architecture—structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus)—so production issues can be diagnosed and resolved within defined SLOs. You will define multi-tenant isolation, access control, and data-governance patterns that meet security, compliance, and data residency requirements. You will set the multi-cloud deployment architecture for containerized workloads on Kubernetes with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) across AWS, GCP, and Azure. You will mentor and coach Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff engineers, raise the bar on engineering standards, and act as a cross-organizational technical authority on distributed systems and data infrastructure.
The role is based onsite in Santa Clara, CA, with up to 15% travel (domestic or international).
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 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 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 both 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
