Staff Backend Software Engineer, Cloud Platform

IonQ•Bothell, WA

3h•$152,000 - $228,000

About The Position

IonQ is seeking a Staff Backend Software Engineer to join the cross-functional team building the IonQ Cloud Platform, which connects customers to quantum computers through APIs, tools, and partner clouds such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. The platform processes customer quantum jobs by breaking them down, compiling, queuing, running them on hardware, and returning results. The role works with product, applications, systems, infrastructure engineering, application development, operations, and scientific teams to build and maintain highly available, fault-tolerant cloud services and create a strong quantum developer experience. A quantum computing background is not required, but curiosity, humility, and willingness to learn are important. Reporting to the Senior Manager of Cloud Engineering, the engineer will contribute to the asynchronous job processing pipeline and define API contracts with backend teams, taking them from design through implementation and release. Alongside new feature development, the role shares responsibility for platform health, including testing, observability, continuous delivery, stability, security, on-call rotations, and incident reviews. The engineer will integrate AI capabilities to improve customer experiences, use AI-assisted development tools responsibly, mentor engineers, and drive technical alignment across teams.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience.
Strong experience with large-scale cloud service platforms and designing scalable, robust services.
Programming experience in languages such as Go, TypeScript, or Python.
Experience with databases such as PostgreSQL.
Experience in a cloud-native environment such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, using Kubernetes or serverless technologies.
Ability to design and implement critical application components, including UX, APIs and services, exception handling, data access, and security.
Experience with automated testing, production troubleshooting, and observability.
Practical experience with AI-assisted engineering tools, including validating generated code for correctness and security.
Track record of leading projects in a cross-functional team.
Strong written and spoken communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

10 or more years of professional full-stack software development experience.
At least 3 years of experience working with Kubernetes.
At least 3 years of experience with NoSQL and SQL databases.
Experience with OAuth-, OpenID-, or SAML-based authentication.
Prior experience developing on Google Cloud Platform, ideally on a cloud platform team at a major provider.
Experience building job processing pipelines for large, complex workloads such as quantum, AI, or video analytics jobs.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and implementation of software experiences for both quantum novices and experts.
Define API contracts with backend teams and take them from design through implementation to release.
Strengthen testing, observability, and continuous delivery practices.
Contribute to the job processing pipeline, including pre-processing, asynchronous execution, post-processing, and returning results.
Develop new features for the platform roadmap while improving its stability and security.
Integrate AI capabilities that improve customer experiences and use AI-assisted development tools responsibly.
Participate in on-call rotations and incident reviews.
Mentor engineers and drive technical alignment across teams.
Collaborate with Infrastructure Engineering, Application Development, and Operations teams to provide highly available, fault-tolerant cloud services.