Senior Software Engineer

Who you are

• To be successful, you will need experience working with Linux based systems and interfacing with hardware, and a track record of making software behave well against unreliable external dependencies. We're looking for someone who can own a problem area with little supervision and judge where robustness is worth the effort
• Strong systems engineering skills. Our controllers are written in Rust, so either solid Rust experience or deep proficiency in another systems language and the appetite to work in a Rust codebase, including async programming
• Experience designing and operating networked services such as gRPC or REST, with a real grasp of error handling, observability and failure modes
• Experience of hardware and instrument protocols and interfaces such as SCPI, Modbus, serial and Ethernet
• Comfortable owning the production behaviour of what you build, not just its correctness in test
• Excellent communication skills both within software and across disciplines, and an interest in helping other engineers get better at the craft without wanting to stop building yourself

What the job involves

• Quantum is now, and it's built here
• Oxford Ionics, now part of IonQ, is pioneering the next generation of quantum computing
• Using our world-leading trapped-ion technology, we're building the most powerful, accurate and reliable quantum systems to tackle problems that today's supercomputers cannot solve
• We're looking for an enthusiastic and highly technical Senior Software Engineer for our non-realtime controllers team who will thrive in our dynamic cross-disciplinary environment
• You will be working closely with our skilled software engineers, our systems teams who operate the physical quantum computers, and our world-leading quantum scientists to build and operate the software that controls the hardware surrounding our quantum computers
• Previous exposure to quantum systems is not required
• You will own areas of the hardware control surface end to end, from the device protocol up to a service running reliably across our fleet
• This is a hands-on engineering role and stays that way as you grow
• A working quantum computer is far more than the ion trap and its real-time control electronics
• It depends on a fleet of supporting hardware, including cryogenic compressors, vacuum pumps, power supplies, lasers, temperature controllers, wavemeters and cameras, that has to be kept observable, controllable and reliable
• The timing-critical operations such as gate waveforms and ion transport run on dedicated real-time FPGA systems, while this team owns everything that does not need hard timing guarantees
• These services run on general-purpose Linux hardware and must be rock-solid, because a failed compressor or an un-noticed pressure drift takes a whole machine offline
• This is a hands-on engineering role, balancing delivery of your own areas with support for the teams and scientists who depend on them
• Own a group of device controllers end to end, covering API design, implementation, rollout and ongoing operational health
• Make services robust against the ways real instruments fail
• Bring devices onto our current framework, and roll the result out across the fleet without disrupting running experiments
• Improve the shared framework where a problem turns out to be common to many controllers rather than specific to one
• Work closely with the systems teams and scientists who depend on these services, and strengthen observability, health checking and alerting
• Raise the standard of the code around you through review, and bring less experienced engineers on by working alongside them