Senior Software Engineer, IonQ

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience
• 5+ years professional experience in software engineering, including work on complex, cross-functional systems
• Strong proficiency in Python, and comfort working below it when needed: debugging across the stack, reasoning about concurrency and async, networking protocols, and performance profiling
• Experience owning the full SDLC for production software, including debugging, incident response, and ongoing maintenance
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Experience writing clear, concise, and comprehensive user-facing documentation, including tutorials, API reference guides, and internal knowledge base articles

Desirable

• We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be part of a cross-functional team whose mission is to lead IonQ on its journey to build the world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems
• In this role, you will apply your deep technical expertise to build and maintain scalable, reliable, and researcher-friendly software that empowers our scientists to accelerate their research and development efforts in quantum networking, computing, and sensing
• You will play a pivotal role in shaping our software architecture, driving SDLC best practices, improving system stability and observability, and mentoring a talented team to deliver innovative solutions that push the boundaries of quantum technology
• Develop, maintain, and support the research and development (R&D) software used by our scientists, ensuring its stability, performance, and day-to-day reliability
• Own the general software development lifecycle for our R&D codebases, including triaging and fixing bugs, addressing regressions, and improving long-term code health
• Improve observability across our R&D software stack (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) so issues are caught early and root-caused quickly
• Contribute to the design, implementation, and management of our backend and frontend for R&D data acquisition
• Design, build, and maintain the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure quality and rapid, reliable deployments
• Design and implement robust systems for the automated calibration and bring-up of lab equipment
• Review scientist-contributed code, providing constructive feedback and guidance on code cleanliness, architecture, and best practices
• Interface with other IonQ software teams to ensure alignment and integration across systems
• Proactively identify opportunities to make R&D software more accessible, scalable, and self-service for scientists
• What success looks like:
• In your first few months, you'll have onboarded across our R&D codebases, started shipping fixes and reviewing scientist contributions, and identified the biggest stability and observability gaps to tackle
• You act as a trusted partner to the scientists on the team: helping them write and structure code, supporting their tooling and documentation needs, running code reviews focused on software quality (organization, readability, maintainability), and flagging cases where deeper science-related review might be needed. No physics or quantum background required, but genuine interest in supporting research work is essential
• By the end of your first six months, you'll own the SDLC health of at least one major codebase, with measurably improved observability and faster diagnosis of production issues
• By the end of your first year, you'll be a recognized technical leader on the team, having driven at least one cross-cutting initiative that improved stability or contributor experience across our stack, and actively mentoring other engineers or scientist contributors