Senior Software Engineer, System Orchestration
Senior software engineer on IonQ's System Orchestration team in Oxford, building the Rust control plane that schedules and arbitrates access to trapped-ion quantum computers, keeps them calibrated and healthy, and records everything that runs. Day-to-day is hands-on service ownership: API design, rollout across the fleet, and operational reliability using Rust, PostgreSQL, and gRPC/REST services.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Oxford, England, United Kingdom
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Experience building stateful services that stay correct under failure
- Track record of changing a load-bearing system while people depend on it
- Strong systems engineering skills: solid Rust experience, or deep proficiency in another systems language with appetite for a Rust codebase, including async programming
- Experience designing and operating networked services (e.g. gRPC or REST) with grasp of error handling, observability and failure modes
- Real experience with a relational database as source of truth: schema design, migrations against live data, transactions (they use PostgreSQL)
- Track record with lifecycle and concurrency: state machines, timeouts, leases, retries, and failure modes under load
- Experience with a scheduler, workflow engine or job queue (Temporal, Airflow, Celery, Slurm, or self-built), or event-driven systems
- Habit of settling design questions in writing, with options weighed as peers
- Comfort owning production behaviour of what you build, not just test correctness
- Excellent communication skills within software and across disciplines
- Interest in helping other engineers improve while continuing to build
- Able to own a problem area with little supervision in a fast-moving, highly technical team
Nice to have
- Running containerised services in production
- Kubernetes experience
- Distributed tracing experience
- Experience with closed-loop systems that act on measured state
- Scientific computing or research facilities experience
Full 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: Oxford, UK
Office commitment: Hybrid
The Role:
We are looking for a highly technical Senior Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team in System Software at Oxford Ionics. In this role, you will be responsible for building and operating the software that keeps our systems calibrated, decides what they do next and keeps the record of what they did, contributing to the team's mission of keeping our quantum computers running useful work around the clock.
The trapped-ion quantum computers we are building will control 10,000 ions within two years, and all of that has to be kept in tune - settings that drift over minutes, hours and days. Without it a computer does not stop; it quietly starts producing invalid output.
Calibration routines, scientists' experiments and customer workloads all compete for physical hardware, and our team builds the control plane that arbitrates that: it schedules and prioritises programs, hands exclusive access to one at a time and takes it back cooperatively, streams results while a program is still running, and keeps the record of everything that ran. It runs on every quantum computer in our fleet. Its job is to keep that machine busy and productive: running quantum programs rather than waiting in between, and running them in spec - on a machine still hitting the fidelity it is meant to hit.
The ambition is for that to run without a person in the loop: machines that assess their own readiness, call for the calibrations they need, and keep a full history of how they were tuned.
You'd work closely with the runtime team who own real-time control, the systems teams who build and maintain our quantum computers, and the operators and scientists who run them.