Staff Site Reliability Engineer

NightDragon Acquisition Corp.; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 228,000; Full time

Job summary

IonQ is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to lead reliability across regions and services in its Santa Clara, CA office with partial remote work. You will own the reliability direction, define standards, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with observability platforms and AI Ops workflows.

You will collaborate with Platform Engineering, DevSecOps, and Product Development to improve stateful and streaming platform reliability, capacity planning, and incident response—helping

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production engineering experience with hands-on reliability work.
• Hands-on experience operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP.
• Observability ownership and governance of SLOs and error budgets.
• Disaster recovery and incident command experience, with root-cause to systemic fixes.
• Multi-team technical leadership and standards adoption beyond a single service.
• Ability to design and lead resilient, automated platforms and AIOps workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own production reliability end-to-end, including SLOs, error budgets, and production outcomes.
• Design and operate the observability stack and ensure instrumented production services.
• Define and manage service-level objectives, run reviews, and drive corrective actions.
• Lead resilience by designing chaos experiments and validating recovery mechanisms.
• Direct incident response as incident commander for high-severity events and ensure rapid remediation.
• Run on-call rotations and clean handoffs across regions to ensure 24/7 coverage.
• Drive disaster recovery testing and improvements based on exercise findings.
• Co-own cloud security posture and runtime vulnerability detection with DevSecOps.
• Oversee reliability of data and streaming services, including capacity planning and autoscaling.

Skills

Production engineering

Incident command

Observability ownership

Reliability improvements

Cross-team collaboration

SRE mindset

Tools

AWS

GCP

Postgres

Redis/Valkey

Kafka

OpenSearch

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 at our Santa Clara, CA office, with the option to work a few days a week remotely.
Travel: Up to 25%
Job ID: 1874

The Role

The Platform Engineering team builds, secures, and operates scalable infrastructure for cloud-managed SaaS products with on-premises components deployed at customer sites.

The Site Reliability Engineering discipline keeps the platform stable and reliable, with a strong focus on service continuity and customer experience. It owns production reliability, service-level objectives, observability architecture, backup and disaster recovery, incident response, and resilience, and co-owns cloud security posture and runtime vulnerability management with DevSecOps.

As Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you set the technical direction for reliability across regions and services. You own the reliability strategy, define the standards and mechanisms that guide production operations, and raise the bar through design leadership, operational discipline, and mentorship. You remain deeply hands-on by designing and operating observability platforms, defining and governing SLO programs, leading high-severity incident response, building resilience and disaster-recovery automation, improving reliability of stateful and streaming platforms, and creating AI Ops workflows for triage, remediation, and self-healing.

The work is driven by observability and automation, with a focus on detecting and fixing issues before customers are affected and using every incident to improve the system.

• Production reliability, SLOs, and error budgets — the reliability of production services end to end, including standards, governance, and escalation for Tier-1 and Tier-2 services.
• Observability architecture and standards — metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and profiles instrumented across production systems, with consistent platform-wide standards.
• Chaos engineering and resilience — failure-injection experiments and validation of recovery mechanisms in pre-production and production environments.
• Backup and disaster recovery — backup validation, disaster-recovery architecture, failover testing, and recovery verification against defined RTO and RPO objectives.
• Cloud security posture — cloud security posture management, runtime vulnerability detection, and configuration-compliance monitoring, co-owned with DevSecOps.
• Data and streaming platform reliability — reliability engineering for Postgres, Redis/Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch, and other critical stateful services.
• Capacity, efficiency, and AI Ops — resource rightsizing, predictive alerting, autonomous triage, remediation automation, and self-healing workflows.
• Incident response and command — severity classification, incident command, executive communication, and blameless post-incident review for the highest-severity events.
• On-call and escalation — rotation design, operational readiness, escalation policy, and clean follow-the-sun handoffs across regions.

Responsibilities

• Production reliability — own service-level objectives, error budgets, and production reliability outcomes end to end, and represent reliability in architecture and scaling decisions.
• Engineer observability — design and operate the observability stack so production services are fully instrumented and define the standards platform and application teams follow.
• Govern SLOs and error budgets — define and manage service-level objectives, run regular reviews with service owners, and drive corrective action when services consume error budgets unsafely.
• Drive resilience — design and execute chaos experiments and validate that failure modes are covered by tested safeguards.
• Lead incident response — define the incident process and serve as incident commander for the highest-severity incidents, including security incidents within the coverage window.
• Run on-call and escalation — establish and manage rotations and escalation paths that provide continuous coverage with clean follow-the-sun handoffs.
• Disaster recovery — own disaster-recovery testing and failover validation against defined recovery objectives and turn exercise findings into architectural and operational improvements.
• Cloud security posture — co-own cloud security posture management, runtime vulnerability detection, and configuration-compliance monitoring with DevSecOps.
• Data, streaming, and AI Ops — own reliability of stateful and streaming services, capacity planning and rightsizing, and autonomous agents for triage, predictive alerting, remediation, and self-healing.
• Scale the team and broaden impact— mentor engineers at different seniority levels, set standards adopted across teams, and align Architecture, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind a shared reliability roadmap.

Requirements

• 7+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on reliability work.
• Hands-on, recent experience operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP.
• Observability ownership — has instrumented production systems and governed service-level objectives and error budgets, not only installed dashboards.
• Resilience practice — has designed and executed failure experiments or disaster-recovery exercises with real failover validation.
• Incident command — has personally commanded serious SEV1/SEV2 incidents and driven root cause through to a systemic fix.
• Demonstrated ownership of reliability outcomes with measurable results, such as availability, mean time to recovery, and error-budget adherence.
• Evidence of multi-team technical leadership through standards, review, coaching, and mechanisms adopted beyond one service or team.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven production experience with cloud security posture management, runtime vulnerability detection, and workload protection across cloud and distributed environments.
• Strong experience prioritizing risk using identity, workload, and exposure-path context to focus remediation on issues that materially increase attack likelihood and operational impact.
• Experience with autonomous remediation and self-healing workflows powered by AIOps, including Amazon Bedrock Agent Core or equivalent agentic automation frameworks.
• Hands-on experience in capacity management, resource rightsizing, efficiency engineering, and practical cost optimization based on FinOps principles.
• Experience with load-balancing design and operations, including health-based failover, global traffic management, and performance optimization for highly available services.
• Experience with AI traffic management via an LLM gateway, including request routing, policy enforcement, rate limiting, model fallback, latency optimization, cost controls, and observability for multi-model or multi-provider environments.
• Ability to connect networking, security, and reliability considerations into cohesive platform design decisions that improve resilience, performance, and operability.

The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.

Wage Transparency

$152,000 — $228,000 USD

Compensation will vary based on individual factors such as education, qualifications, and experience of the final candidate(s), specific office location, and calibration against relevant market data and internal team equity. Posted base salary figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. Our benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, matching 401(k), unlimited PTO and paid holidays, parental/adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided when a candidate receives an offer of employment.

At IonQ, we believe in fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all while striving to identify and eliminate barriers. We empower employees to thrive by fostering a culture of autonomy, productivity, and respect. We are dedicated to creating an environment where individuals can feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued.

We are committed to equity and justice. We welcome different voices and viewpoints and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ancestry, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.

US Technical Jobs. The position you are applying for will require access to technology that is subject to U.S. export control and government contract restrictions. Employment with IonQ is contingent on either verifying “U.S. Person” (e.g., U.S. citizen, U.S. national, U.S. permanent resident, or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum) status for export controls and government contracts work, obtaining any necessary license, and/or confirming the availability of a license exception under U.S. export controls. Please note that in the absence of confirming you are a U.S. Person for export control and government contracts work purposes, IonQ may choose not to apply for a license or decline to use a license exception (if available) for you to access export-controlled technology that may require authorization, and similarly, you may not qualify for government contracts work that requires U.S. Persons, and IonQ may decline to proceed with your application on those bases alone. Accordingly, we will have some additional questions regarding your immigration status that will be used for export control and compliance purposes, and the answers will be reviewed by compliance personnel to ensure compliance with federal law.

US Non-Technical Jobs. Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum. Accordingly, we will have some additional questions regarding your immigration status that will be used for export control and compliance purposes, and the answers will be reviewed by compliance personnel to ensure compliance with federal law.