Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a deeply hands-on Staff 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.

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 that expose platform data to internal consumers and external integrations, evaluated by uptime, latency SLAs, and adoption by downstream teams.
• Data Engineering & Storage
  • Implement and evolve the time-series storage layer (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or equivalent), optimizing for query performance, retention policies, and data fidelity under production load.
  • Build event streaming pipelines using Kafka or Kinesis with at-least-once or exactly-once semantics, validated through integration tests and production monitoring.
  • Design data partitioning and archival strategies that sustain target ingest volumes while meeting defined latency and durability SLAs.
• Platform Reliability & Operations
  • Own service reliability end-to-end — participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response, and drive systemic improvements tracked via post-mortems and reduction in repeat incidents.
  • Instrument all services with structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) so that production issues can be diagnosed and resolved within defined SLOs.
  • Packaging and deploying services as containerized workloads on Kubernetes, maintaining infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) across AWS, GCP, and Azure environments.
  • Contribute to multi-cloud deployment patterns that meet platform availability targets and data residency requirements.
• Collaboration & Engineering Quality
  • Partner with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into tested, production-grade implementations with clear engineering specifications.
  • Lead code reviews and serve as the primary technical authority for the team's engineering standards; mentor junior and senior engineers through pairing and guidance, establishing patterns and practices that raise the bar across teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a strong record of shipping production services at scale.
• Proven, hands-on proficiency in Go and/or Rust — you write these languages regularly and can demonstrate production systems you have built with them.
• Solid experience building and operating distributed data systems: event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), time-series databases, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing tradeoffs.
• Experience with cloud-native deployment: containerization (Docker), Kubernetes orchestration, and operating services across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Familiarity with observability tooling — structured logging, metrics (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry or equivalent).
• Comfortable writing SQL and working with both relational and time-series data models; experience with schema design and query optimization.
• Strong engineering practices: test-driven or test-informed development, code review, CI/CD, and operational ownership including on-call.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and influence engineering direction across multiple teams, with a track record of cross-functional technical leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with network telemetry protocols (gNMI, NETCONF, SNMP) or prior work at a network equipment vendor or network management platform company (e.g., Juniper, Cisco, Nokia).
• Hands-on experience with graph databases or graph data models for network topology (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or custom adjacency representations).
• Familiarity with YANG data modeling or prior experience working with device configuration schemas in network management contexts.
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS backend services with strong data isolation and per-tenant resource management.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, observability, or networking projects; or published technical writing on distributed systems topics.
• Experience working in or adjacent to regulated, security-conscious environments (FedRAMP, NIST, or equivalent).