Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer — Go/Rust Backend

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

Job summary

IonQ, a leading quantum platform, is hiring a Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services, telemetry ingestion, and device management for a cloud-native, multi-cloud platform. You’ll build high-throughput pipelines, time-series storage, and APIs with Go and/or Rust, while ensuring observability, reliability, and scalable architecture across IonQ's networks and security platform.

You will partner with principal architects to set technical direction, mentor engineers, and

Qualifications

• 12+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a strong record of shipping production services at scale.
• Proven, hands-on proficiency in Go and/or Rust — you write these languages regularly and can demonstrate production systems you have built with them.
• Solid experience building and operating distributed data systems: event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), time-series databases, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing tradeoffs.
• Experience with cloud-native deployment: containerization (Docker), Kubernetes orchestration, and operating services across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Familiarity with observability tooling — structured logging, metrics (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry or equivalent).
• Comfortable writing SQL and working with both relational and time-series data models; experience with schema design and query optimization.
• Strong engineering practices including TDD, code review, CI/CD, and on-call ownership — plus a demonstrated track record of defining and evangelizing these practices at the organizational level across multiple teams or companies.
• Established record of setting technical direction at the organizational level — shaping how engineering teams across IonQ approach distributed systems and infrastructure problems, beyond a single team or domain.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production backend services in Go and/or Rust, measured by code quality, test coverage, and on-time delivery of service milestones.
• Build and maintain high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines using gNMI, NETCONF, and SNMP, ensuring reliable data collection across large device fleets.
• Develop RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform data to internal consumers and external integrations, evaluated by uptime, latency SLAs, and adoption by downstream teams.

Skills

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Kafka

Kubernetes

SQL

OpenTelemetry

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

gNMI

NETCONF

SNMP

Kafka

Kinesis

InfluxDB

TimescaleDB

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

IonQ, a leading quantum platform, is hiring a Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services, telemetry ingestion, and device management for a cloud-native, multi-cloud platform. You’ll build high-throughput pipelines, time-series storage, and APIs with Go and/or Rust, while ensuring observability, reliability, and scalable architecture across IonQ's networks and security platform.

You will partner with principal architects to set technical direction, mentor engineers, and