Senior Software Engineer, Quantum Systems (Hybrid Oxford)

Physics World Jobs; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

IonQ stock options

Annual performance bonus

Generous annual leave

Flexible hybrid working

Private medical and dental insurance

Job summary

IonQ is seeking a highly technical Senior Software Engineer for the System Orchestration team in System Software, based in Oxford, UK. You will build and operate the control plane that calibrates quantum systems, schedules workloads, and records execution history across a fleet of trapped-ion machines.

You'll own end-to-end controllers, ensure robustness under failure, and collaborate with runtime and systems teams to maintain high fidelity operations.

Qualifications

• Experience building stateful services that stay correct under failure.
• Ability to own a problem area with minimal supervision.
• Strong background in designing and operating networked services (gRPC/REST).
• Experience with relational databases as a source of truth (PostgreSQL).
• Familiarity with concurrency, timeouts, leases, and retries under load.

Responsibilities

• Own a group of device controllers end to end: API design, implementation, rollout and health.
• Make services robust against instrument failure.
• Bring devices onto our current framework and roll out fleet-wide.
• Improve shared framework to address common problems across controllers.
• Enhance observability, health checks, and alerting with systems teams.

Skills

Rust

Async programming

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

gRPC/REST

Stateful services

Scheduling/Workflow

Code review & mentoring

System observability

Kubernetes

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Rust tooling

Job description

IonQ is seeking a highly technical Senior Software Engineer for the System Orchestration team in System Software, based in Oxford, UK. You will build and operate the control plane that calibrates quantum systems, schedules workloads, and records execution history across a fleet of trapped-ion machines.

You'll own end-to-end controllers, ensure robustness under failure, and collaborate with runtime and systems teams to maintain high fidelity operations.