Principal Distributed Systems Engineer
Core
Designing and scaling the distributed backend for IonQ's Network and Security Platform, including ingestion pipelines, event streaming, telemetry processing, and data storage layers to secure networks against quantum threats.
Role type
Principal Distributed Systems Engineer (Infrastructure & Data)
Builds
Multi-tenant, data-intensive distributed platforms for quantum network security and observability
Domain
Quantum Computing Infrastructure / Distributed Systems
Required skills
Distributed systems architecture, Event streaming (Kafka/Kinesis), Time-series databases, Cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Go/Rust, System reliability engineering, Security architecture, Technical leadership
Preferred skills
Multi-cloud deployment strategies, gRPC/gNMI/NETCONF/SNMP integration, OpenTelemetry/Prometheus observability, Cross-functional technical mentorship
Technologies
Go, Rust, Kafka, Kinesis, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Azure, gRPC, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry
Responsibilities
Define multi-year architecture and technical roadmap for the distributed backend; Architect high-throughput ingestion and telemetry pipelines; Design event streaming and time-series storage strategies; Build production-quality services and reference implementations in Go/Rust; Establish observability architecture and multi-tenant security patterns; Mentor Senior and Staff engineers on distributed systems best practices
Seniority
Principal, hands-on IC with strategic leadership (via careerplan.io/jobs/6211311004-principal-distributed-systems-engineer-at-ionq)
