Staff Backend Engineer - Go/Rust, Telemetry

Physics World; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 188,000 - 246,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ, based in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a deeply hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services including ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, and device management that provide real-time visibility and secure, quantum-safe operations.

You will write production-grade Go and/or Rust, own services end-to-end, and collaborate with the Principal Architect to translate platform decisions into reliable implementations, driving observability, reliability, and cross-team

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience shipping production services at scale.

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.
• Own service reliability end-to-end - participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response, and drive systemic improvements tracked via post-mortems and reduction in repeat incidents.

Skills

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

On-call / incident response

CI/CD

Code reviews

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

InfluxDB

TimescaleDB

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Docker

Kubernetes

gNMI

NETCONF

SNMP

Job description

IonQ, based in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a deeply hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own backend services including ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, and device management that provide real-time visibility and secure, quantum-safe operations.

You will write production-grade Go and/or Rust, own services end-to-end, and collaborate with the Principal Architect to translate platform decisions into reliable implementations, driving observability, reliability, and cross-team