About the Role
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.
The Role
We are looking for a senior Systems Software Engineer to join our Runtime Software team at Oxford Ionics / IonQ. In this role, you will be responsible for working directly with the experimental scientists to implement the real-time control system behaviours and provide abstractions they require for their experiments, contributing to the team’s mission of enabling our science teams to experiment and improve the primitive operations which allow compute, and building towards fault tolerant computation.
Responsibilities
In this position, you will work on developing abstractions over real-time control hardware, supporting the effective delivery of a control system capable of repeatedly and reproducibly driving our ions with nano-second level precision, with abstractions which are conducive to both fast iteration and system scaling.
You’ll have the opportunity to accelerate the science core to the development of our systems, and contribute to the core execution model of our quantum computers, contributing directly to the success of building utility-scale quantum computers.
Key Responsibilities Include
- Collaborating with scientists to understand their requirements
- Interfacing with system orchestration, non-realtime control and compiler teams to ensure our work integrates seamlessly with the wider software architecture.
- Interfacing with FPGA and electronics teams to shape the overall system architecture.
- Implementing drivers for various real-time devices.
- Producing tooling to enable users of our code to iterate rapidly and fearlessly.
- Developing the execution environment for the user programs which run on our systems.
- Continually evaluating the shape of our APIs and improving them for our internal users.
Requirements
Strong programming skills
You need to have strong programming skills in a systems programming language.
Software system design
Experience with software system design is essential.
High quality code
A desire to produce high quality code appropriate to a real-time environment is required.
Collaborative environment
Ability to quickly iterate on low-level code in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary environment.
Nice to Have
Familiarity with FPGA and electronics teams is a plus.
Understanding of quantum computing principles would be beneficial.
Benefits
Remote work option
This role offers the option to work a few days a week remotely.
Travel opportunities
There may be travel opportunities, up to 5%.