Software Engineer, System Orchestration

Location: Oxford, UK
Office commitment: Hybrid

The Role:

We are looking for an enthusiastic Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team in System Software at Oxford Ionics. In this role, you will be responsible for building 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.

You will own features end to end, from the API through to the rollout onto real machines. You'll play an important part in shaping the services that support our work in building the world's most advanced quantum systems. Previous exposure to quantum systems is not required.

Responsibilities:

In this position, you will work on the services that schedule work onto our quantum computers and keep the record of it, supporting the effective delivery of a control plane the whole fleet depends on.

You'll have the opportunity to own real pieces of that system end to end, contributing directly to the success of the System Software function.

Key responsibilities include:

• Build and extend the services that schedule work on our systems and keep the record of it.
• Build the mechanisms that decide when a system needs re-tuning, and get those calibrations run.
• Own what we persist: the data model, its migrations, and the code that reads and writes it.
• Produce the tests and harnesses that let our code be exercised against real hardware and against simulators.
• Work with the systems teams to roll releases out across the fleet and support them once they are running.
• Improve the observability of the code you ship.
• Take part in code review, and improve the APIs our internal users depend on

Requirements:

To be successful, you will need solid programming skills, an interest in the systems that keep long-running machines working, and either experience of a systems programming language or the appetite to learn one. We're looking for someone who can work comfortably in a Linux environment, cares about what happens to data when a service crashes or a migration goes wrong, and can contribute effectively within a fast moving, highly technical team.

You'd be a great fit with:

• Strong programming skills in one or more mainstream programming languages.
• Experience with a systems programming language. Our System Orchestration layer is written in Rust, so either some Rust experience or the appetite to learn it.
• Comfort with relational databases and SQL; we use PostgreSQL.
• Some exposure to networked services and APIs, such as gRPC or REST.
• Exposure to schedulers, job queues or workflow engines - Celery, Airflow, Temporal, Slurm or similar.
• Comfort working on Linux, and debugging a service that is already running.
• Good communication skills both within software and across disciplines.
• A habit of producing appropriate tests and taking part in code review.

Additional useful experience would include async programming, containers and Kubernetes, closed-loop systems that act on measured state, and scientific computing or research facilities.

Benefits

Be part of a team that’s shaping the future of quantum. We offer more than just a role, you’ll join a world class community of scientists, engineers and innovators working to unlock the full potential of quantum computing.

We offer a range of benefits, including opportunities to further your career alongside industry leaders, a competitive salary with IonQ stock options, an annual performance bonus, generous annual leave, flexible hybrid working, private medical and dental insurance for you and your family, and much more.

Join us and be part of the future of quantum computing.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.