Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Distributed Systems (Go/Rust)

Physics World; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 283,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. is seeking a deeply hands-on Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own IonQ's Network and Security Platform. You will build backend services, telemetry pipelines, and APIs that provide real-time visibility and quantum-safe capabilities across large device fleets.

You’ll write production Go and/or Rust, own operations, and drive architecture decisions with the Principal Architect. The role emphasizes end-to-end service ownership, high-throughput data processing, and strong

Qualifications

• 12+ years of backend engineering experience delivering production services.
• Expert in Go and/or Rust with production-grade backends.
• Solid background in distributed data systems and event streaming.
• Experience with cloud-native deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Responsibilities

• Own backend services end-to-end, from ingestion to APIs.
• Build high-throughput telemetry pipelines and time-series storage.
• Implement observability with logging, tracing, and metrics.
• Lead reliability improvements and on-call rotations.

Skills

Backend engineering

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Kafka/Kinesis

Kubernetes

Docker

OpenTelemetry

Tools

Go

Rust

Kafka

Kinesis

Kubernetes

Docker

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Job description

IonQ, Inc. is seeking a deeply hands-on Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own IonQ's Network and Security Platform. You will build backend services, telemetry pipelines, and APIs that provide real-time visibility and quantum-safe capabilities across large device fleets.

You’ll write production Go and/or Rust, own operations, and drive architecture decisions with the Principal Architect. The role emphasizes end-to-end service ownership, high-throughput data processing, and strong