Principal Solutions Architect - Quantum-Safe Networks

Physics World; Oregon (WI); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. is seeking a Principal Solutions Architect to design how networks become quantum-safe for the world’s largest operators and governments.

You will shape quantum-safe architectures and migration paths, collaborate with GTM colleagues, and lead architecture discussions, proofs of concept, and interoperability tests. You will balance customer-facing work with design authority, standards work, and thought leadership, turning field learnings into reference architectures, playbooks, and

Qualifications

• Experience in network architecture and cryptography.
• Strong communication with CISOs and network engineers.
• Public speaking and thought leadership in quantum-safe networking.

Responsibilities

• Design quantum-safe target architectures and migration paths for customer networks—spanning WAN and transport, data center and campus, segmentation and access control, key management, and the crypto that underpins all of it.
• Lead technical discovery and architecture.

Skills

Quantum-safe networking

Architecture design

Customer-facing communication

Public speaking

Cryptography knowledge

Job description

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc . [NYSE: IONQ] is the world's leading quantum platform and merchant supplier - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ's newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance .

Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our quantum computing services are available through all major cloud providers, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before.

Location

This position is US-based and can work onsite or hybrid from one of our offices or fully remote.

Travel

Up to 30%, domestic and international

Job ID

1779

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Solutions Architect to design how networks become quantum-safe - for the largest network operators, enterprises, and government agencies in the world.

Today's networks are secured with cryptography that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will break. Every operator and enterprise will have to inventory their cryptography, make it agile, migrate to post-quantum algorithms, and in the highest-assurance segments complement that with quantum-safe key distribution. Almost nobody knows yet what that architecture actually looks like. That is the problem you will solve - first with customers, on real networks, and then as reusable architectures that shape what IonQ builds.

This role sits deliberately in multiple places. A part of your time is customer-facing: in collaboration with our GTM colleagues, you'll lead architecture discussions, design quantum-safe target architectures and migration paths, run proofs of concept and interoperability tests, and support complex pursuits as the technical authority. The other part of your time is spent on design authority, standards work, and providing thought leadership internally and externally, including public speaking: turning what you learn in the field from internal and external peers into reference architectures, migration playbooks, standards, white papers, blogs, conference talks, and product requirements that our engineering and product teams build against.

You are equally comfortable in a firewall design review as you are in a discussion about hybrid key exchange and crypto-agility. You can explain to a CISO why their crypto inventory is the hard part, and to a network engineer exactly which IPsec algorithms to use and where they could insert external key material in order to become quantum-safe.

This is not a software architecture role - you will not own a codebase (it's a plus if you can do some scripting). It is an architecture and customer role: you own designs, decisions, and the technical credibility of IonQ's quantum-safe networking story.

Responsibilities

• Design quantum-safe target architectures and migration paths for customer networks - spanning WAN and transport, data center and campus, segmentation and access control, key management, and the crypto that underpins all of it.
• Lead technical discovery and architecture