Senior System Software Engineer — Quantum Orchestration

IonQ, Inc.; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

IonQ stock options

Annual performance bonus

Generous annual leave

Private medical and dental insurance

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. in Oxford is seeking a highly technical Staff Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team.

You will build and operate the software that calibrates and controls our trapped-ion quantum computers, keeping them running useful work around the clock and in tune with high fidelity. This is a hands-on, cross‑disciplinary role writing Rust code, shaping service boundaries, and enabling deterministic scheduling and data integrity across the fleet.

Qualifications

• Expert systems engineering skills with strong Rust or equivalent systems language experience.
• Experience building and operating stateful networked services in production (gRPC/REST).
• Track record on data durability, crash recovery, and migrations on live data.

Responsibilities

• Support the control plane across services for reliable operation of the fleet.
• Remove classes of failure and raise engineering standards.
• Define boundaries between services and drive coding across them.
• Ensure design correctness is demonstrable, not just argued.
• Build tooling and test infrastructure to accelerate the team.
• Evolve deployment/operational models as the fleet grows.

Skills

Rust

Async

PostgreSQL

gRPC/REST

Observability

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Temporal

Airflow

Job description

IonQ, Inc. in Oxford is seeking a highly technical Staff Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team.

You will build and operate the software that calibrates and controls our trapped-ion quantum computers, keeping them running useful work around the clock and in tune with high fidelity. This is a hands-on, cross‑disciplinary role writing Rust code, shaping service boundaries, and enabling deterministic scheduling and data integrity across the fleet.