Senior Staff DevOps Engineer

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Staff DevOps Engineer to join our Quantum Platform Network Security Engineering Team. 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the CI/CD pipeline platform: design, build, and maintain shared pipeline libraries, reusable templates, and standards that enable application teams to configure their own pipeline instances via self-service.
• Maintain infrastructure-specific pipelines directly.
• Define and implement deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags) that minimize deployment risk and enable rapid rollback.
• Own end-to-end release management for infrastructure and product services: define versioning strategies, coordinate cross-service releases, manage release trains, and make release go/no-go decisions in partnership with Security (vulnerability gate) and SRE (reliability readiness).
• Ensure every release cycle includes a risk assessment checkpoint: vulnerability scan results reviewed, dependency risk evaluated, compliance posture confirmed, and rollback plan validated before production promotion.
• Establish and maintain GitOps practices using declarative infrastructure and application definitions stored in version control as the single source of truth.
• Develop, test, and maintain IaC modules (OpenTofu modules, Terragrunt configurations, Packer templates, Ansible playbooks, Helm charts, Kustomize overlays) following patterns defined by Architecture.
• Build and maintain self-service developer portals, environment provisioning tools, and internal developer platforms that enable developers to trigger deployments and provision environments without DevOps intervention.
• Track and report on DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and SDLC health indicators using Jira for sprint velocity, backlog health, and cross-team dependency tracking; identify bottlenecks and drive continuous improvement.
• Design, build, and operate agentic workflows using AWS Agent Core to automate repetitive DevOps tasks including pipeline failure triage, dependency update orchestration, environment provisioning, release coordination, and intelligent deployment decision-making.
• Continuously identify candidates for agentic automation across daily operations.
• Instrument deployments with observability, configure SLO monitoring for pipelines, implement canary analysis and automated rollback, and participate in incident response.

Requirements

• 5 years of hands-on expertise in Pipeline Orchestration (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and advanced Git workflows, including experience utilizing GitHub Actions OIDC and Workload Identity Federation.
• 5 years of practical application in Scripting Languages (Python, Bash, Go).
• 4 years of direct experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible).
• 4 years of demonstrated background in Containerization (Docker, Buildah) and Kubernetes deployment/operations (EKS, Kyverno, Bottlerocket), alongside a proven track record with GitOps practices (Flux, Helm) and artifact management (Artifactory, Nexus, ECR/ACR/GAR).
• Technical proficiency integrating pipeline security scanning (SAST, DAST, SCA), container scanning, and IaC validation/testing (Trivy, native OpenTofu test frameworks).
• Established background implementing AI Ops and Agentic Frameworks, including AWS Agent Core and LLM-based automation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Kubernetes administrator or developer certification (CKA/CKAD).
• Experience supporting Event Streaming Platforms (MSK/Kafka, IAM auth, TLS).
• Experience with internal developer platforms (Backstage, Port).
• Background in platform engineering at scale (100+ developers).
• Experience with multi-environment promotion strategies.
• Experience with SBOM generation (Syft, CycloneDX), Cosign artifact signing, and supply chain security.
• DevSecOps pipeline design and vulnerability management at scale.
• Experience with AI Ops, intelligent automation, or agentic AI frameworks for operational tasks.
• Experience with AWS Agent Core or equivalent agentic orchestration platforms.