Full-Time

Senior Staff Site Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer

Posted on 8/16/2026

IonQ

IonQ

1,001-5,000 employees

Trapped-ion quantum computing hardware and services

Compensation Overview

$187.9k - $269.5k/yr

+ Bonus + Equity + Home technology stipend

Santa Clara, CA, USA

In Person

Travel up to 25% required.

Category
DevOps & Infrastructure (1)
Required Skills
Kubernetes
Python
Incident Response
Distributed Systems
Software Testing
Computer Networking
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Version Control
AWS
Go
JIRA
Observability
Confluence
DevOps
Google Cloud Platform

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Requirements
  • At least 12 years of production engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or cloud operations experience, including recent hands-on reliability work.
  • Recent experience designing and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.
  • Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and production failure modes.
  • Demonstrated ownership of observability architecture, including instrumentation of production systems and governance of metrics, logs, traces, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and error budgets.
  • Proven experience establishing reliability and operational-readiness standards for business-critical services.
  • Hands-on experience designing and executing failure experiments, disaster-recovery exercises, and validated service failovers.
  • Experience personally commanding SEV1 or SEV2 incidents, coordinating technical and executive communications, and driving root causes through to systemic remediation.
  • Demonstrated ownership of measurable reliability outcomes such as availability, latency, mean time to resolution, change-failure rate, alert quality, and error-budget adherence.
  • Experience with capacity forecasting, performance testing, scaling strategies, and cloud and Kubernetes resource management.
  • Strong software engineering and automation skills using languages such as Python or Go, infrastructure as code, and modern delivery toolchains.
  • Evidence of multi-team technical leadership through architecture reviews, standards, coaching, and mechanisms adopted beyond a single service or team.
  • Ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and deliver complex initiatives without relying on direct management authority.
Responsibilities
  • Own the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for operational excellence and production readiness across development, pre-production, and production environments.
  • Define and govern the New Service Introduction framework, including mandatory architecture, security, resilience, capacity, observability, supportability, and release-readiness reviews before services enter production.
  • Establish organization-wide service ownership standards covering service catalog records, accountable owners, dependency maps, runbooks, support models, escalation paths, recovery objectives, and on-call readiness.
  • Lead the architecture and evolution of the shared observability platform, establishing consistent standards for logs, metrics, distributed traces, and profiles across production systems.
  • Define standards for dashboards, alert policies, synthetic monitoring, telemetry quality, retention, sampling, cardinality, and cost controls.
  • Own the reliability governance model for production services, including service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, and escalation mechanisms.
  • Connect service-health signals to customer and business impact, enabling early anomaly detection, service-degradation prevention, and rapid isolation of end-user-impacting events.
  • Advance incident-management maturity through consistent severity classification, incident command, stakeholder and executive communications, automated evidence collection, and coordinated response to high-severity incidents.
  • Establish blameless post-incident review practices, ensure remediation actions are tracked to completion, and drive systemic fixes for recurring failure modes.
  • Lead operational capacity and efficiency management, including demand forecasting, cloud and Kubernetes capacity, performance testing, scaling thresholds, headroom policies, resource rightsizing, and capacity-risk reviews.
  • Design and govern artificial intelligence operations capabilities for event correlation, alert-noise reduction, predictive detection, probable root-cause analysis, autonomous triage, assisted remediation, and controlled self-healing.
  • Deliver secure AI-agent workflows across observability platforms, service catalog, Jira, Confluence, source control, and continuous integration and continuous delivery.
  • Improve on-call effectiveness through sustainable rotation design, operational-readiness standards, escalation policies, diagnostic automation, alert-quality management, and reliable follow-the-sun handoffs.
  • Provide hands-on technical leadership during major incidents, complex reliability investigations, architectural reviews, resilience exercises, and critical service launches.
  • Use operational data, incident trends, service-level performance, capacity signals, change outcomes, and automation effectiveness to prioritize continuous improvement.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience prioritizing operational risk using identity, workload, dependency, and exposure-path context to focus remediation on issues with material customer or business impact.
  • Experience designing artificial intelligence operations capabilities for anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive alerting, root-cause analysis, and operational noise reduction.
  • Hands-on experience with autonomous remediation and self-healing workflows using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore or comparable agentic automation frameworks.
  • Experience integrating governed AI agents with operational platforms such as Jira, Confluence, source control, continuous integration and continuous delivery, service catalogs, and observability systems.
  • Practical experience with capacity optimization, resource rightsizing, efficiency engineering, telemetry cost management, and FinOps principles.
  • Experience designing and operating load-balancing solutions, health-based failover, global traffic management, and performance optimization for highly available services.
  • Ability to integrate networking, security, resilience, performance, and operability requirements into cohesive platform architecture decisions.
  • Experience with progressive-delivery techniques such as canary deployments, blue-green deployments, automated rollback, and feature-flag governance.
  • Experience establishing sustainable global on-call models and follow-the-sun operational practices.

IonQ sells quantum computing through cloud access and on-site systems that use trapped-ion qubits. Its processors, such as Forte and Tempo, are accessed by customers via cloud platforms or deployed on customer sites, and the company is expanding into quantum networking, quantum key distribution, and sensing through acquisitions and a SkyWater Technology deal. It differentiates itself with trapped-ion technology and by building a broader quantum ecosystem through strategic acquisitions and partnerships to connect devices and services beyond hardware alone. Its goal is to scale commercial quantum computing, grow revenue, and strengthen its cash position to support ongoing expansion and ecosystem development.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

College Park, Maryland

Founded

2015

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • IonQ raised 2026 revenue guidance to $450 million-$460 million on September 8, 2026.
  • FTC cleared the $1.8 billion SkyWater acquisition on July 31, 2026.
  • Congruity360 signed an $8.18 million quantum-security deal with IonQ in 2026.

What critics are saying

  • IonQ posted a $271.5 million operating loss in Q1 2026 and still burns cash.
  • Stock-based compensation and acquisition share issuance keep diluting holders every quarter.
  • If Superion 256 slips past 2027, IonQ remains a financing-dependent science project.

What makes IonQ unique

  • IonQ owns trapped-ion hardware, quantum networking, and U.S. semiconductor fabrication after SkyWater.
  • Its all-to-all qubit connectivity beats routing-heavy superconducting systems from IBM and Google.
  • IonQ sells both cloud access and on-prem systems, spanning compute, security, and sensing.

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Benefits

Biweekly catered lunches

Parental leave

Health, vision, & dental insurance

Flexible time off

401(k) with 5% match

University facilities

Commuter benefits

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

3%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

-1%
Yahoo Finance
Sep 11th, 2026
IonQ sees 287% revenue surge as quantum computing timeline accelerates to 2029

IonQ is positioning itself as a leading pure-play quantum computing investment as the industry accelerates towards viability, with timelines moving from 2030 to 2029. The company distinguishes itself through trapped-ion quantum computing technology, which prioritises accuracy over the speed-focused superconducting techniques used by competitors like Alphabet, Microsoft, and IBM. IonQ reported 287% year-over-year revenue growth, with management projecting 100% organic growth for the year. While legacy tech giants possess greater resources, their quantum computing divisions would have minimal impact on overall financials. IonQ's survival depends entirely on developing viable quantum computing products, creating significant risk but potentially substantial upside for investors. The company's focus on accuracy addresses the primary barrier preventing quantum computing's current commercial availability.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 9th, 2026
IonQ CEO says quantum computers could crack Bitcoin encryption by 2028 — yet Strategy just bought $370M more

IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi said a 2,000-qubit quantum computer could break Bitcoin's elliptic-curve encryption in under 26 days. Speaking on CNBC, he reiterated 2028 as his expectation for "Q-Day", when quantum machines will threaten current public-key standards. De Masi noted the timeline has compressed significantly. A year ago, experts thought Q-Day would occur in the 2030s, but now understand it will happen in the 2020s. IonQ's CFO warned that financial services is waking up to the reality that encryption protocols securing Bitcoin wallets may be broken. De Masi acknowledged IonQ sells quantum security solutions whilst raising the alarm. The company just launched a quantum key distribution product aimed at protecting fibre networks. IonQ reported second-quarter revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 8th, 2026
IonQ and Congruity360 sign $8.18M quantum-security agreement to protect US enterprise data

IonQ and Congruity360 have announced an $8.18 million agreement to enhance quantum-safe data protection, marking one of the largest commercial quantum security deals in the United States. Under the partnership, Congruity360 will integrate IonQ's quantum key distribution and post-quantum cryptography appliances into its enterprise data management platform. The collaboration responds to a June 2026 White House executive order that moved federal post-quantum security deadlines forward to 2030 and extended requirements to contractors. IonQ will provide its Clavis QKD pairs and Solteris Network Appliances to protect sensitive data for Congruity360's clients across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal services, manufacturing, defence, and higher education sectors. The deal extends IonQ's quantum-safe network deployments, following earlier initiatives including a statewide network with Florida LambdaRail and upgrades in Switzerland with Cisco.

Associated Press
Sep 8th, 2026
IonQ unveils Superion 256 quantum computer, scales to millions of qubits with 300x cost reduction

IonQ has launched its sixth-generation quantum computing platform, Superion 256, marking a shift toward scalable, manufacturable quantum systems. The 256-qubit system is the first in IonQ's Superion product line, built on semiconductor manufacturing processes rather than traditional one-off laboratory approaches. The platform uses IonQ's Electronic Qubit Control technology, which controls trapped-ion qubits with integrated electronics instead of laser systems. IonQ fabricated the chips at its subsidiary SkyWater, compressing design cycles from nine months to two. Superion 256 fits standard data center racks and draws less power than GPU racks. The platform is designed to scale from 256 qubits to millions, with IonQ already developing a 10,000-qubit version concurrently. The system is available for order now, with customer deliveries expected in 2027. IonQ pre-sold its first Superion 256 system in early 2026.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 2nd, 2026
IonQ stock unlikely to surge in 12 months despite 287% revenue jump and $1.8B SkyWater acquisition

IonQ shares are trading near $39, valuing the quantum computing company at roughly $15 billion. The stock has traded as high as $84 over the past 12 months. The company reported $80.1 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 287% year-over-year. IonQ recently acquired chip foundry SkyWater for $1.8 billion in cash and stock. SkyWater generated $317.1 million in revenue through the first half of 2026. Management is guiding for full-year revenue of $280 million to $290 million. Combined with SkyWater's projected $600 million, IonQ could reach approximately $900 million in total revenue this year. However, IonQ reported a $254.7 million operating loss through six months of 2026. The company's share count is increasing significantly, with approximately 24 million new shares added from the SkyWater acquisition and $450 million in stock-based compensation over the past year.

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