Staff DevOps Engineer

IonQ•Santa Clara, CA

2d•$1 - $1•Hybrid

About The Position

IonQ is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to join their Quantum Platform Network Security Engineering Team. This role focuses on building, securing, and operating scalable infrastructure for cloud-managed SaaS products, including on-premises components. The DevOps discipline is responsible for the entire system that takes code from commit to production securely, reliably, and quickly, with security integrated at every step. The Staff DevOps Engineer will set the technical direction for this system, owning its roadmap, making architectural and tooling decisions, and improving processes through standards, reviews, and mentorship. The role requires hands-on work in pipeline coding, infrastructure-as-code development, security scanning configuration, dependency management, release infrastructure operation, and managing physical and virtual systems for on-premises deployments. The work is automation-first, aiming to automate repetitive tasks through pipelines or agentic workflows.

Requirements

8+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on work.
Hands-on, recent experience building and operating CI/CD pipeline platforms at production scale.
Experience with security embedded into pipelines as a practitioner, including configuring scanning and driving vulnerabilities to closure within a deadline.
Authored and tested Infrastructure-as-Code with production modules.
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 for the software factory roadmap, architecture, and tooling decisions.
Embed scanning and policy enforcement into every pipeline stage to make secure delivery the default.
Operate the release train (versioning, environment promotion) and the release gate, including an expedited hotfix pipeline.
Automate dependency updates, track freshness, generate SBOMs, and verify artifact provenance.
Build and improve the internal developer platform to enable self-service capabilities for product teams.
Write and test production infrastructure-as-code modules with high rigor.
Run vulnerability scanning, drive findings to closure within security-based service-level targets, and maintain continuous audit evidence.
Build and operate agentic workflows for pipeline triage, dependency orchestration, and routine support, enforcing guardrails for autonomous actions.
Mentor engineers, raise the bar through standards and reviews, and align Architecture, SRE, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind the roadmap.