Lead Site Reliability Engineer — AI Ops & Resilience

NightDragon Acquisition Corp.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 152,000 - 228,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to lead reliability across regions and services in its Santa Clara, CA office with partial remote work. You will own the reliability direction, define standards, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with observability platforms and AI Ops workflows.

You will collaborate with Platform Engineering, DevSecOps, and Product Development to improve stateful and streaming platform reliability, capacity planning, and incident response—helping

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production engineering experience with hands-on reliability work.
• Hands-on experience operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP.
• Observability ownership and governance of SLOs and error budgets.
• Disaster recovery and incident command experience, with root-cause to systemic fixes.
• Multi-team technical leadership and standards adoption beyond a single service.
• Ability to design and lead resilient, automated platforms and AIOps workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own production reliability end-to-end, including SLOs, error budgets, and production outcomes.
• Design and operate the observability stack and ensure instrumented production services.
• Define and manage service-level objectives, run reviews, and drive corrective actions.
• Lead resilience by designing chaos experiments and validating recovery mechanisms.
• Direct incident response as incident commander for high-severity events and ensure rapid remediation.
• Run on-call rotations and clean handoffs across regions to ensure 24/7 coverage.
• Drive disaster recovery testing and improvements based on exercise findings.
• Co-own cloud security posture and runtime vulnerability detection with DevSecOps.
• Oversee reliability of data and streaming services, including capacity planning and autoscaling.

Skills

Production engineering

Incident command

Observability ownership

Reliability improvements

Cross-team collaboration

SRE mindset

Tools

AWS

GCP

Postgres

Redis/Valkey

Kafka

OpenSearch

Job description

IonQ is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to lead reliability across regions and services in its Santa Clara, CA office with partial remote work. You will own the reliability direction, define standards, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with observability platforms and AI Ops workflows.

You will collaborate with Platform Engineering, DevSecOps, and Product Development to improve stateful and streaming platform reliability, capacity planning, and incident response—helping