Senior Software Engineer, System Orchestration (Hybrid)

NightDragon Acquisition Corp.; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

IonQ stock options

Performance bonus

Hybrid working

Medical and dental insurance

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

IonQ in Oxford is seeking a highly technical Senior Software Engineer to join the System Orchestration team in System Software. You will build and operate the software that calibrates quantum systems, schedules programs and manages hardware access across the fleet.

This hands-on role emphasizes stateful services, concurrency, and reliability, with collaboration across runtime, systems, operations and scientists.

Qualifications

• Strong systems engineering skills; Rust experience or strong alternative systems language.
• Experience designing and operating networked services (gRPC/REST), with observability and failure-mode focus.
• Experience with PostgreSQL as a source of truth, including migrations and transactions.
• Track record of lifecycle and concurrency: state machines, timeouts, leases, retries, and load testing.
• Familiarity with schedulers/workflows (Temporal/Airflow/Celery/Slurm) or event-driven systems.

Responsibilities

• Own a service end to end: API design, rollout and ongoing operational health.
• Build closed-loop behavior that reacts to measured system state without human intervention.
• Design state machines and persistence to survive restarts as a decision, not an accident.
• Evolve APIs and onboard clients, expanding the ecosystem.
• Improve observability, health checks and alerting; contribute to code quality.

Skills

Rust

Systems language

Async programming

API design (gRPC/REST)

PostgreSQL

State machines

Concurrency

Observability

Scheduling/Workflow

Tools

Kubernetes

Temporal

PostgreSQL

Job description

IonQ in Oxford is seeking a highly technical Senior Software Engineer to join the System Orchestration team in System Software. You will build and operate the software that calibrates quantum systems, schedules programs and manages hardware access across the fleet.

This hands-on role emphasizes stateful services, concurrency, and reliability, with collaboration across runtime, systems, operations and scientists.