Staff Software Engineer, System Orchestration
Hands-on staff engineer building the Rust control plane that keeps IonQ's trapped-ion quantum computers calibrated, scheduled, and logged — stateful services over PostgreSQL and gRPC/REST so machines run useful, in-spec work around the clock. Hybrid role based in Oxford, UK; no quantum background required.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Oxford, England, United Kingdom
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Expert systems engineering skills — solid Rust experience, or deep proficiency in another systems language plus appetite to work in a Rust codebase, including async programming
- Deep experience building and operating stateful networked services in production, exposed over gRPC or REST, with a real grasp of error handling, observability and failure modes
- Track record with data durability and correctness — persistence design, crash recovery, and migrations against live data you cannot afford to lose (they use PostgreSQL)
- Instinct to reach for determinism when chasing a timing or interleaving bug, rather than for more logging
- Depth in the scheduling and workflow landscape — Temporal, Hatchet, Airflow, Slurm, Postgres-backed queues
- Track record of pinning down failures that others could not
- Habit of settling design questions in writing, with options compared as peers
- Excellent communication skills both within software and across disciplines
Nice to have
- Replacing a load-bearing system while it stays in service
- Containerised services in production
- Kubernetes and declarative deployment
- Distributed tracing
- Formal specification or model checking
- 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 Staff 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.