Senior Staff DevOps Engineer

IonQ•Santa Clara, CA

7d•$216,136 - $282,978•Onsite

About The Position

IonQ is seeking a Senior Staff DevOps Engineer to join their Quantum Platform Network Security Engineering Team. This role is based onsite in Santa Clara, CA. The Platform Engineering team is responsible for building, securing, and operating scalable infrastructure for cloud-managed SaaS products, including on-premises components at customer sites. The DevSecOps discipline specifically manages the "software factory," an end-to-end system designed for secure, reliable, and fast code deployment from commit to production, with security integrated at every stage. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will define the technical direction for the software factory, own its roadmap, and make key architectural and tooling decisions that influence how all product teams ship software. You will also elevate standards through mentorship and reviews, while remaining hands-on by writing pipeline code, developing infrastructure-as-code modules, configuring security scanning, managing dependencies, operating release infrastructure, and managing physical and virtual systems for on-premises deployments. The role emphasizes an automation-first approach, aiming to automate repetitive tasks through pipelines or agentic workflows. Key areas of focus include the CI/CD pipeline platform, pipeline security and policy, release engineering and governance, dependency management and supply-chain security, internal developer platform, infrastructure as code, security operations and compliance, on-premises and hybrid operations, and agentic automation and AI security.

Requirements

12+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on work.
Hands-on, recent experience building and operating CI/CD pipeline platforms at production scale.
Security embedded into pipelines as a practitioner — has personally configured scanning and driven a real vulnerability to closure within a deadline.
Infrastructure-as-Code authored and tested, with production modules to show, not only consumed.
Demonstrated ownership of release, dependency, or vulnerability-management outcomes with measurable results.
Scripting and automation fluency, with a clear bias toward removing manual toil.

Nice To Haves

Supply-chain security depth (signing, SBOMs, provenance, SLSA).
Internal developer platform or self-service design, measured by adoption.
Release-gate or release-train ownership, including expedited or emergency-change delivery under pressure.
Agentic delivery automation (AWS Agent Core or equivalent) and AI or LLM security practice.

Responsibilities

Set the direction — own the software-factory roadmap and the architecture and tooling decisions behind it, and bring the organization along with you, so that every service builds, tests, scans, signs, and deploys through self-service, with no manual gates beyond code review and release approval.
Make security the fast path — embed scanning and policy enforcement into every pipeline stage so secure delivery is the default, not a bottleneck.
Run release management — operate the release train (versioning, environment promotion) and the release gate, and the expedited hotfix pipeline fast but fully gated.
Keep dependencies and the supply chain healthy — automate dependency updates, track freshness, generate SBOMs, and verify artifact provenance.
Build and improve the internal developer platform — deliver self-service capabilities that let product teams ship quickly and safely.
Engineer infrastructure as code — write and test production modules with the same rigor product teams apply to application code.
Operate security and compliance — run vulnerability scanning, drive findings to closure within security-based service-level targets and keep audit evidence continuously current.
Automate with agents — build and operate agentic workflows for pipeline triage, dependency orchestration, and routine support, and enforce guardrails for autonomous actions.
Scale the team and broaden impact — mentor engineers at different seniority levels, raise the bar through standards, review, and golden paths, and align Architecture, SRE, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind the roadmap.