Staff Platform Engineer

Location: Oxford, England, UK

Working pattern: Hybrid

Role:

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to join the Quantum System Infrastructure team at IonQ, based in our Oxford office. In this role, you will be responsible for the platform that our engineering and science teams use to build, test and deliver quantum systems to customers, contributing to the team's mission of applying DevSecOps principles to deliver reliable, secure and observable infrastructure, on-site and in the cloud.

As a Staff Engineer you will play a leading role in shaping the clusters, pipelines, monitoring and remote development environments that support our work in building the world's most advanced quantum systems. You'll have the opportunity to drive meaningful work in a unique environment, operating alongside the physicists and engineers who build those systems, and see vacuum chambers, cryostats and lasers in action on site.

Responsibilities:

In this position, you will build and run the infrastructure behind our quantum systems, on-site and in the cloud, so the teams who build them can ship changes quickly and safely. You'll have the opportunity to shorten the time from a code change to a running quantum system, contributing directly to the delivery of quantum systems to our customers. As a senior member of the team, you will take on central roles in strategic projects for the Platform team, and will lead on defining, driving and implementing them.

You'll work with a wide range of partners and internal customers across IonQ's locations: physicists, lab technicians, firmware and software engineers, IT, product management and production SRE. You'll talk to them, see where they get stuck and fix the cause.

Key responsibilities include:

• Run and evolve the Kubernetes platform behind each quantum system, and the release process that promotes software onto it (k3s, ArgoCD, Helm)
• Make CI faster and more reliable for every engineer, including our scarce hardware-in-the-loop and FPGA build runners and build caches (GitHub Actions)
• Make our systems observable: define dashboards and alerts as code for quantum system hardware such as lasers, cryogenics and vacuum, and move them onto IonQ's shared observability platform with our production Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) colleagues (Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Give every engineer and physicist a ready-to-use remote development environment, on-site or in the cloud, that works with our quantum system hardware
• Keep our on-site and cloud infrastructure secure, recoverable, reproducible and reviewable as code (OpenTofu, Atmos), from secrets and access to certificates and identity, and work with IonQ's infrastructure team on shared cloud services
• Lead technical decisions and write the runbooks and guides that let other teams change the platform safely themselves

Requirements:

To be successful, you will need hands-on experience running Linux infrastructure in production, ideally both on-premises and in the cloud, with infrastructure as code, Kubernetes and CI/CD. We're looking for someone who can diagnose problems across the whole stack, from a storage fault to a failing pipeline to a development environment that will not start, who treats observability and security as part of the job rather than an afterthought, and who can lead a piece of work from design to rollout within a fast-moving, highly technical team. You will write mostly Python, shell and OpenTofu. Our product code is Rust and Python: your job will be to make it build and test faster rather than write it.

Our platform spans our on-site quantum systems, and many changes reach live quantum systems. Every change goes through review and automated validation before it is applied, so we value people who plan for rollback, test against the real system and write down what they learn. Experience with AI coding tools is helpful, as is an interest in quantum computing though prior experience is not required.

You’d be a great fit with:

• 5+ years in a Platform, DevOps or Site Reliability role, running Linux systems in production
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or OpenTofu
• Running containerised workloads on Kubernetes in production
• Building and speeding up CI/CD pipelines, ideally in GitHub Actions
• Observability and security for production systems: monitoring, alerting, secrets and access control

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.