Senior Software Engineer, System Orchestration

Quantum is now, and it's built here.

Oxford Ionics, now part of IonQ, is pioneering the next generation of quantum computing. Using our world-leading trapped-ion technology, we’re building the most powerful, accurate and reliable quantum systems to tackle problems that today’s supercomputers cannot solve. Joining Oxford Ionics means becoming part of a global IonQ team that is transforming the future of quantum technology - faster, at scale, and with real world impact.

IonQ, Inc. [NYSE: IONQ] is the world’s leading quantum company delivering solutions to solve the world’s most complex problems. IonQ’s newest generation quantum computers, IonQ Tempo and IonQ Forte Enterprise, are the latest in cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners such as Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results. The company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance in 2025.

The company is accelerating its technology roadmap and intends to deliver the world’s most powerful quantum computers with 2 million qubits by 2030 to accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. IonQ’s advancements in quantum networking position the company as a leader in building the quantum internet.

What to expect:

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.

What you'll be responsible for:

This is a hands-on engineering role, balancing delivery of your own areas with support for the teams and scientists who depend on them.

Key responsibilities include:

• Own a group of device controllers end to end, covering API design, implementation, rollout and ongoing operational health.
• Make services robust against the ways real instruments fail.
• Bring devices onto our current framework, and roll the result out across the fleet without disrupting running experiments.
• Improve the shared framework where a problem turns out to be common to many controllers rather than specific to one.
• Work closely with the systems teams and scientists who depend on them.