Staff DevOps Engineer

📋 Job Overview

About 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.

🏢 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 Staff DevOps Engineer to join our Quantum Platform Network Security Engineering Team. The Platform Engineering team builds, secures, and operates scalable infrastructure for cloud-managed SaaS products with on-premises components deployed at customer sites. The DevOps discipline owns the \"software factory\" — the end-to-end system that takes code from commit to production securely, reliably, and fast, with security embedded into every stage. As a Staff DevOps Engineer, you set the technical direction for the software factory. You own its roadmap, make the architecture and tooling decisions that shape how every product team ships, and raise the bar through standards, review, and mentorship. You remain deeply hands-on by writing pipeline code, building and testing infrastructure-as-code modules, configuring security scanning, managing dependencies, operating release infrastructure, and, where on-premises infrastructure is in scope, running physical and virtual systems. The work is automation-first with every repetitive task a candidate for a pipeline or an agentic workflow.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Set the direction — own the software-factory roadmap and the architecture and tooling decisions behind it, and bring the organization along with you, so that every service builds, tests, scans, signs, and deploys through self-service, with no manual gates beyond code review and release approval.
• Make security the fast path — embed scanning and policy enforcement into every pipeline stage so secure delivery is the default, not a bottleneck.
• Run release management — operate the release train (versioning, environment promotion) and the release gate, and the expedited hotfix pipeline fast but fully gated.
• Keep dependencies and the supply chain healthy — automate dependency updates, track freshness, generate SBOMs, and verify artifact provenance.
• Build and improve the internal developer platform — deliver self-service capabilities that let product teams ship quickly and safely.
• Engineer infrastructure as code — write and test production modules with the same rigor product teams apply to application code.
• Operate security and compliance — run vulnerability scanning, drive findings to closure within security-based service-level targets and keep audit evidence continuously current.
• Automate with agents — build and operate agentic workflows for pipeline triage, dependency orchestration, and routine support, and enforce guardrails for autonomous actions.
• Scale the team and broaden impact — mentor engineers at different seniority levels, raise the bar through standards, review, and golden paths, and align Architecture, SRE, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind the roadmap.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on work.
• Hands-on, recent experience building and operating CI/CD pipeline platforms at production scale.
• Security embedded into pipelines as a practitioner — has personally configured scanning and driven a real vulnerability to closure within a deadline.
• Infrastructure-as-Code authored and tested, with production modules to show, not only consumed.
• Demonstrated ownership of release, dependency, or vulnerability-management outcomes with measurable results.
• Scripting and automation fluency, with a clear bias toward removing manual toil.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Supply-chain security depth (signing, SBOMs, provenance, SLSA).
• Internal developer platform or self-service design, measured by adoption.
• Release-gate or release-train ownership, including expedited or emergency-change delivery under pressure.
• Agentic delivery automation (AWS Agent Core or equivalent) and AI or LLM security practice.

🎁 Benefits

The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, matching 401(k), unlimited PTO and paid holidays, parental/adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided when a candidate receives an offer of employment.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

The position you are applying for will require access to technology that is subject to U.S. export control and government contract restrictions. Employment with IonQ is contingent on either verifying “U.S. Person” (e.g., U.S. citizen, U.S. national, U.S. permanent resident, or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum) status for export controls and government contracts work, obtaining any necessary license, and/or confirming the availability of a license exception under U.S. export controls. Please note that in the absence of confirming you are a U.S. Person for export control and government contracts work purposes, IonQ may choose not to apply for a license or decline to use a license exception (if available) for you to access export-controlled technology that may require authorization, and similarly, you may not qualify for government contracts work that requires U.S. Persons, and IonQ may decline to proceed with your application on those bases alone. Accordingly, we will have some additional questions regarding your immigration status that will be used for export control and compliance purposes, and the answers will be reviewed by compliance personnel to ensure compliance with federal law.