Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

Clutch Canada; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Network and Security Platform team. You will own the backend services, ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, and device management, providing real-time visibility and secure, scalable infrastructure.

You will write production-quality Go and/or Rust daily, with strong ownership and a focus on reliability. Collaborate with the Principal Architect to translate architecture decisions into

Qualifications

• Experience building data-intensive backend systems at scale.
• Writes production-quality Go and/or Rust daily with strong operational ownership.
• Comfortable owning backend services end-to-end and ensuring reliability.

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 gN

Skills

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Job description

About IonQ:

IonQ, Inc. [NYSE: IONQ] is the world's leading quantum platform and merchant supplier - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ's newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.

Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our quantum computing services are available through all major cloud providers, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before.

Location

This role is based onsite at our office in Santa Clara, CA.

Travel

Up to 15% domestic or international.

Job ID

1721

The Role

We are looking for a deeply hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to join the team building IonQ's Network and Security Platform. You will own the backend services - ingestion pipelines, telemetry processing, device management - that give operators real-time visibility into their networks and the intelligence to make them quantum-safe. This is infrastructure that matters: the systems you build will underpin IonQ's mission to secure the world’s networks against quantum threats.

In this role, you will own backend services end-to-end - from high-throughput ingestion pipelines collecting telemetry from large device fleets, to time-series storage, real-time processing engines, and the APIs that surface platform data to the rest of the organization. You are a deeply hands-on engineer who writes production-quality Go and/or Rust daily, takes pride in operational ownership, and brings strong distributed systems fundamentals to every problem you tackle.

You will work closely with the Principal Architect to translate platform architecture decisions into reliable, well-tested, production-grade implementations. The ideal candidate has direct experience building data-intensive backend systems at scale - and is energized by the challenge of making complex infrastructure simple, observable, and dependable.

Responsibilities

Backend Services & Production Code

• 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 gN