Senior Rust Systems Orchestration Engineer

IonQ, Inc.; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

IonQ stock options

Annual performance bonus

Hybrid working

Medical and dental insurance

Generous leave

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. in Oxford, UK, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the System Orchestration team to build and operate software that calibrates and schedules actions for our quantum computers.

You will help run the control plane that keeps machines busy, calibrated and productive in a demanding, high‑tech environment. The role emphasizes hands-on engineering, collaboration with runtime, systems, operators and scientists, and growth within a fast-moving team.

Qualifications

• Experience building stateful services that stay correct under failure.
• Ability to own a problem area with little supervision in a fast-moving team.
• Strong systems engineering and Rust experience or equivalent in a Rust codebase.
• Experience designing and operating networked services (gRPC/REST) with observability and failure mode awareness.
• Real experience with a relational database as source of truth (PostgreSQL).
• Track record of lifecycle and concurrency: state machines, timeouts, leases, retries under load.
• Experience with a scheduler/workflow engine (Temporal, Airflow, Celery, Slurm) or event-driven systems.
• Strong written design communication and production ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own a group of device controllers end to end, covering API design, implementation, rollout and ongoing operational health.
• Make services robust against failures of real instruments.
• Bring devices onto our current framework and roll the result across the fleet without disrupting experiments.
• Improve the shared framework where problems are common across controllers.
• Work with systems teams and scientists to strengthen observability, health checks and alerting.
• Raise the standard of code through peer reviews and mentoring.

Skills

Rust

Async programming

gRPC/REST

Observability

PostgreSQL

State machines

Scheduling / workflow

Concurrency

Communication skills

Mentoring

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Job description

IonQ, Inc. in Oxford, UK, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the System Orchestration team to build and operate software that calibrates and schedules actions for our quantum computers.

You will help run the control plane that keeps machines busy, calibrated and productive in a demanding, high‑tech environment. The role emphasizes hands-on engineering, collaboration with runtime, systems, operators and scientists, and growth within a fast-moving team.