Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production backend services in Go and/or Rust
• Build and maintain high-throughput telemetry ingestion pipelines using gNMI, NETCONF, and SNMP
• Develop RESTful and gRPC APIs for platform data exposure
• Implement and evolve time-series storage layers like InfluxDB or TimescaleDB
• Build event streaming pipelines using Kafka or Kinesis
• Own service reliability, including on-call rotation and incident response
• Instrument services with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and structured logging
• Package and deploy containerized workloads on Kubernetes using Terraform
• Partner with Principal Architects and mentor junior/senior engineers

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Hands-on proficiency in Go and/or Rust
• Experience building distributed data systems (Kafka, Kinesis, time-series databases)
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, failure modes, idempotency)
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Familiarity with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Proficiency in SQL and working with relational and time-series data models
• Strong engineering practices including CI/CD, TDD, and operational ownership
• Proven track record of technical leadership and influencing engineering direction

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with network telemetry protocols (gNMI, NETCONF, SNMP)
• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j, Amazon Neptune)
• Familiarity with YANG data modeling
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS backend services
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or networking projects
• Experience in regulated or security-conscious environments (FedRAMP, NIST)

About the Company

IonQ is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier, delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security.