Full-Time

Senior Staff Site Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer

IonQ

IonQ

1,001-5,000 employees

Trapped-ion quantum computing hardware and services

Compensation Overview

$187.9k - $269.5k/yr

+ Bonus + Equity

Santa Clara, CA, USA

Remote

Travel up to 25% required.

Category
DevOps & Infrastructure (1)
Required Skills
Kubernetes
Python
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 Severity 1 or Severity 2 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 systems.
  • 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 systems, 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 Q2 2026 revenue 287% to $80.1 million and lifted guidance.
  • DARPA awarded IonQ up to $58 million on August 6, 2026.
  • IonQ ended Q2 2026 with $485 million in remaining performance obligations and $3.0 billion cash.

What critics are saying

  • Scott+Scott investigated IonQ in February 2026 after Wolfpack alleged misleading Pentagon-contract disclosures.
  • IonQ’s $1.9 billion Q2 2026 GAAP loss exposed warrant-driven accounting volatility.
  • If 256-qubit deployment slips beyond 2026, customers defer orders and backlog converts slowly.

What makes IonQ unique

  • IonQ’s trapped-ion architecture delivered 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity in 2026.
  • IonQ closed SkyWater on July 31, 2026, becoming vertically integrated in chips.
  • IonQ combines computing, networking, sensing, and security under one full-stack platform.

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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

-5%

1 year growth

-8%

2 year growth

-10%
Yahoo Finance
Aug 22nd, 2026
IonQ quantum computing stock surges with 287% revenue growth to $80.1M

IonQ, a quantum computing company, is developing technology toward practical applications despite current accuracy limitations. The company's systems achieve 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, the industry's best, though still below classical computer standards. IonQ is working on a fault-tolerant 10,000-qubit quantum computer, considered the minimum for mainstream viability. Its 256-qubit system is currently undergoing testing. In Q2, IonQ's revenue surged 287% year over year to $80.1 million. Acquisitions contributed to this growth, but management projects over 100% organic growth for the year, measuring only gains from existing business units. The company is collaborating with customers and partners to fund research and develop commercially viable products. IonQ stock currently trades below its all-time highs.

Yahoo Finance
Aug 11th, 2026
Pentagon awards IonQ $58M contract to produce shoebox-sized quantum clocks

IonQ has secured a $28 million contract modification from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop optical atomic clocks, with an option for an additional $30 million. The Maryland-based quantum technology company will produce 25 Evergreen-05 optical atomic clocks initially, with the potential for 100 more units if the option is exercised. IonQ is investing $15 million in manufacturing infrastructure to support production. The clocks will be used for radar, secure communications, and geolocation where GPS access is compromised. The Evergreen-05 is a shoebox-sized device that accumulates less than one second of timing error over 30 million years. It delivers timing stability of 50 femtoseconds at one second in approximately 1/75th the volume of an active hydrogen maser. The technology is designed for terrestrial, sea, and airborne military platforms.

Yahoo Finance
Aug 8th, 2026
IonQ Q2 revenue soars 287% to $80.1M, raises guidance despite $1.9B loss

IonQ reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, exceeding its own expectations by 20%. The quantum computing company raised its standalone full-year revenue outlook to $280 million–$290 million whilst maintaining expectations for roughly 100% organic growth. The company recently completed a $1.8 billion acquisition of SkyWater Technology, adding US-based semiconductor design, fabrication and packaging capabilities. IonQ is targeting commissioning of 256-qubit systems in 2027 and developing a path toward 10,000-qubit chips. The company reported a $1.9 billion GAAP net loss, largely due to a $1.6 billion non-cash warrant valuation impact. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $120.3 million.

Yahoo Finance
Aug 4th, 2026
IonQ revenue surges 755% to $64.7M as quantum computing gains momentum against AMD's $10.3B

IonQ reported first-quarter revenue of $64.7 million for the period ended March 2026, representing a 755% year-over-year increase. The quantum computing company achieved a gross margin of 24% and completed its acquisition of SkyWater Technology whilst introducing new earth monitoring capabilities. By comparison, Advanced Micro Devices generated $10.3 billion in revenue for the quarter ended March 2026, with a net income margin of 14%. The processor manufacturer entered a capacity agreement with Core Scientific and launched new processing hardware. The revenue comparison highlights the differing scales between the established artificial intelligence sector and emerging quantum computing industry. Whilst AMD demonstrates significantly larger absolute revenue figures, IonQ's triple-digit growth rate reflects the substantial expansion potential within quantum computing technology.

Yahoo Finance
Aug 4th, 2026
BigBear.ai vs. IonQ: Which tech stock is the better buy in 2026?

BigBear.ai and IonQ represent contrasting investment opportunities in the tech sector. BigBear.ai provides AI-driven decision intelligence solutions primarily to US federal agencies, focusing on logistics and cybersecurity challenges. In fiscal 2025, BigBear.ai reported revenue of $127.7 million, down 19.3% year-over-year, with a net loss of $293.9 million. The company maintains a current ratio of 1.8x and zero debt-to-equity ratio, though free cash flow was negative $42.5 million. IonQ develops trapped-ion quantum computing systems for applications in medicine, finance, and logistics, delivering services through cloud platforms including Amazon's. The company acquired SkyWater Technology in July 2026 to establish its own semiconductor foundry. Both companies face distinct challenges: BigBear.ai's heavy reliance on government contracts creates concentration risk, whilst IonQ pursues longer-term quantum computing opportunities.