Senior Research Software Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be part of a cross-functional team whose mission is to lead IonQ on its journey to build the world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems. In this role, you will apply your deep technical expertise to build and maintain scalable, reliable, and researcher-friendly software that empowers our scientists to accelerate their research and development efforts in quantum networking, computing, and sensing.

Responsibilities

Develop, maintain, and support the research and development (R&D) software used by our scientists, ensuring its stability, performance, and day-to-day reliability; Own the general software development lifecycle for our R&D codebases, including triaging and fixing bugs, addressing regressions, and improving long-term code health; Improve observability across our R&D software stack (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) so issues are caught early and root-caused quickly; Contribute to the design, implementation, and management of our backend and frontend for R&D data acquisition; Design, build, and maintain the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure quality and rapid, reliable deployments; Design and implement robust systems for the automated calibration and bring-up of lab equipment; Review scientist-contributed code, providing constructive feedback and guidance on code cleanliness, architecture, and best practices; Interface with other IonQ software teams to ensure alignment and integration across systems; Proactively identify opportunities to make R&D software more accessible, scalable, and self-service for scientists

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience; 5+ years professional experience in software engineering, including work on complex, cross-functional systems; Strong proficiency in Python, and comfort working below it when needed: debugging across the stack, reasoning about concurrency and async, networking protocols, and performance profiling; Experience owning the full SDLC for production software, including debugging, incident response, and ongoing maintenance; Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines; Experience writing clear, concise, and comprehensive user-facing documentation, including tutorials, API reference guides, and internal knowledge base articles

Nice to have

8+ years of professional software experience, ideally in a scientific or R&D environment, supporting research teams; Experience developing software for hardware control, automation, or data acquisition; Demonstrated experience mentoring and providing technical leadership to other engineers; Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern DevOps practices; Experience with database design and management

Benefits

comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans; matching 401(k); unlimited PTO and paid holidays; parental/adoption leave; legal insurance; home technology stipend