Senior Backend Engineer - Go/Rust, Scalable Infra

IonQ; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 163,430 - 213,972; Full time

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a deeply hands-on Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services powering our quantum platform.

You will design and ship high-throughput ingestion pipelines, time-series storage, and APIs that surface data for internal teams. The role demands production-grade Go and/or Rust, strong distributed systems fundamentals, and experience with Kafka or Kinesis, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• 6+ years backend software engineering experience shipping production services.
• Proficiency in Go and/or Rust with production systems demonstrated.
• Experience building distributed data systems including event streaming and time-series storage.
• Cloud-native deployment with Docker, Kubernetes and at least one major cloud provider.
• Strong observability: logging, metrics, tracing with OpenTelemetry or similar.
• Solid CS fundamentals and on-call ownership experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production backend services in Go and/or Rust.
• Build high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines and time-series storage.
• Develop RESTful and gRPC APIs for internal and external use.
• Implement event streaming pipelines with Kafka or Kinesis.
• Design data partitioning and archival strategies with latency and durability SLAs.
• Own reliability end-to-end, lead incident response, and mentor engineers.

Skills

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Backend services

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Docker

Kubernetes

SQL

TimescaleDB

InfluxDB

Job description

IonQ, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a deeply hands-on Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services powering our quantum platform.

You will design and ship high-throughput ingestion pipelines, time-series storage, and APIs that surface data for internal teams. The role demands production-grade Go and/or Rust, strong distributed systems fundamentals, and experience with Kafka or Kinesis, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms.