Staff Platform Engineer

About IonQ: IonQ, Inc . [NYSE: IONQ] is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance . Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our quantum computing services are available through all major cloud providers, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before. Location: Oxford, England, UK Working pattern: Hybrid Role: We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to join the Quantum System Infrastructure team at IonQ, based in our Oxford office. In this role, you will be responsible for the platform that our engineering and science teams use to build, test and deliver quantum systems to customers, contributing to the team's mission of applying DevSecOps principles to deliver reliable, secure and observable infrastructure, on-site and in the cloud. As a Staff Engineer you will play a leading role in shaping the clusters, pipelines, monitoring and remote development environments that support our work in building the world's most advanced quantum systems. You'll have the opportunity to drive meaningful work in a unique environment, operating alongside the physicists and engineers who build those systems, and see vacuum chambers, cryostats and lasers in action on site. Responsibilities: In this position, you will build and run the infrastructure behind our quantum systems, on-site and in the cloud, so the teams who build them can ship changes quickly and safely. You'll have the opportunity to shorten the time from a code change to a running quantum system, contributing directly to the delivery of quantum systems to our customers. As a senior member of the team, you will take on central roles in strategic projects for the Platform team, and will lead on defining, driving and implementing them. You'll work with a wide range of partners and internal customers across IonQ's locations: physicists, lab technicians, firmware and software engineers, IT, product management and production SRE. You'll talk to them, see where they get stuck and fix the cause. Key responsibilities include: • Run and evolve the Kubernetes platform behind each quantum system, and the release process that promotes software onto it (k3s, ArgoCD, Helm) • Make CI faster and more reliable for every engineer, including our scarce hardware-in-the-loop and FPGA build runners and build caches (GitHub Actions) • Make our systems observable: define dashboards and alerts as code for quantum system hardware such as lasers, cryogenics and vacuum, and move them onto IonQ's shared observability platform with our production Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) colleagues (Grafana, OpenTelemetry) • Give every engineer and physicist a ready-to-use remote development environment, on-site or in the cloud, that works with our quantum system hardware • Keep our on-site and cloud infrastructure secure, recoverable, reproducible and reviewable as code (OpenTofu, Atmos), from secrets and access to certificates and identity, a