I
IonQ
Senior Software Engineer (System Orchestration)
Skills
RustReactApache Airflow
13 days ago
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Important information
Contract type:
Permanent
Location:
Oxford, UK
Work mode:
Onsite
Published on:
10 October 2026
What they need
- We are looking for a highly technical Senior Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team in System Software at Oxford Ionics
- In this role, you will be responsible for building and operating the software that keeps our systems calibrated, decides what they do next and keeps the record of what they did, contributing to the team’s mission of keeping our quantum computers running useful work around the clock
- The trapped-ion quantum computers we are building will control 10,000 ions within two years, and all of that has to be kept in tune - settings that drift over minutes, hours and days
- Without it a computer does not stop; it quietly starts producing invalid output
- Calibration routines, scientists’ experiments and customer workloads all compete for physical hardware, and our team builds the control plane that arbitrates that: it schedules and prioritises programs, hands exclusive access to one at a time and takes it back cooperatively, streams results while a program is still running, and keeps the record of everything that ran
- It runs on every quantum computer in our fleet
- Its job is to keep that machine busy and productive: running quantum programs rather than waiting in between, and running them in spec - on a machine still hitting the fidelity it is meant to hit
- The ambition is for that to run without a person in the loop: machines that assess their own readiness, call for the calibrations they need, and keep a full history of how they were tuned
- You’d work closely with the runtime team who own real-time control, the systems teams who build and maintain our quantum computers, and the operators and scientists who run them
- This is a hands-on engineering role and stays that way as you grow in it. You’ll play an important part in shaping the services that support our work in building the world’s most advanced quantum systems. Previous exposure to quantum systems is not required
- In this position, you will work on a service or subsystem of the control plane end to end, supporting the effective delivery of software every machine in the fleet depends on
- You’ll have the opportunity to set how it behaves under failure and to move live systems onto it safely, contributing directly to the success of the System Software function
- Own a service or subsystem end to end - API design, implementation, rollout and ongoing operational health
- Build closed-loop behaviour that acts on measured system state without a person in the loop
- Design state machines and their persistence together, so that what survives a restart is a decision rather than an accident
- Make our services behave correctly under concurrency and partial failure.Move live systems onto new behaviour without losing data or interrupting work in flight
- Evolve our APIs, and bring the clients that depend on them along
- 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- To be successful, you will need experience building stateful services that stay correct under failure, and a track record of changing a load-bearing system while people depend on it. We’re looking for someone who can own a problem area with little supervision and contribute effectively within a fast moving, highly technical team
- A track record of getting lifecycle and concurrency right: state machines, timeouts, leases, retries, and the failure modes that only show up under load
- Experience designing and operating networked services (such as gRPC or REST), with a real grasp of error handling, observability and failure modes
- A habit of settling design questions in writing, with options weighed as peers
- Experience with a scheduler, workflow engine or job queue - Temporal, Airflow, Celery, Slurm, or one you built - or with event-driven systems that react to changes in state
- Comfort owning the production behaviour of what you build, not just its correctness in test
- Real experience with a relational database as a source of truth - schema design, migrations against live data, and transactions. We use PostgreSQL
- An interest in helping other engineers get better at the craft, without wanting to stop building yourself
- Strong systems engineering skills. Our System Orchestration layer is 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
- Excellent communication skills both within software and across disciplines
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