Senior Staff Reliability & Observability Architect

Ionq; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ is seeking a Senior Staff Service Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer to shape reliability across regions and services. You will design and operate observability platforms, govern SLO programs, lead high-severity incident response, and drive self-healing through AI Ops workflows.

You will own the reliability governance model for production services, align with business impact, and mentor teams while delivering scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-native platforms on AWS/GCP.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of production engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or cloud operations experience, including recent hands-on reliability work.
• Recent experience designing and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, CI/CD, and production failure modes.
• Demonstrated ownership of observability architecture, including instrumentation of production systems and governance of metrics, logs, traces, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for operational excellence and production readiness across development, pre-production, and production environments.
• Define and govern the New Service Introduction framework, including mandatory architecture, security, resilience, capacity, observability, supportability, and release-readiness reviews before services enter production.
• Establish organization-wide service ownership standards covering service catalog records, accountable owners, dependency maps, runbooks, support models, escalation paths, recovery objectives, and on-call readiness.
• Lead the architecture and evolution of the shared observability platform, establishing consistent standards for logs, metrics, distributed traces, and profiles across production systems.

Skills

Production engineering

SRE

Observability

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Incident response

Python

Go

IaC

Tools

Python

Go

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

IonQ is seeking a Senior Staff Service Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer to shape reliability across regions and services. You will design and operate observability platforms, govern SLO programs, lead high-severity incident response, and drive self-healing through AI Ops workflows.

You will own the reliability governance model for production services, align with business impact, and mentor teams while delivering scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-native platforms on AWS/GCP.