Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer at IonQ
Santa Clara, CA
$216,136–$282,978from the description
Jul 7, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior backend engineering role focused on building and operating the distributed infrastructure behind a quantum networking and security platform. Day-to-day work centers on high-throughput telemetry ingestion, time-series data storage, event streaming pipelines, and gRPC/REST APIs — all deployed on Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers. The position suits a deeply hands-on engineer with 12+ years of backend experience, strong distributed systems fundamentals, and a track record of setting technical direction across engineering organizations.
Staff level · 12+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 5 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 120 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 50–190
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The title is 'Senior Staff Distributed Systems Engineer' — 'Senior Staff' is treated as Staff-level (one band above Senior), consistent with the cross-organizational technical direction and org-wide scope described in the JD. The seniority assessment reflects the genuine Staff-level scope (setting direction across multiple teams, partnering with a Principal Architect), not merely the 12+ years experience requirement.
Go and Rust are listed as 'and/or' — the JD requires proficiency in at least one; both are emitted as required with each as the other's alternative.
Kafka and Kinesis are listed as interchangeable event-streaming options in the requirements section; Kafka is the primary with Kinesis as the alternative.
InfluxDB and TimescaleDB are listed as interchangeable time-series storage options in the requirements section; InfluxDB is the primary with TimescaleDB as the alternative.
AWS, GCP, and Azure are listed as 'at least one major cloud provider' — AWS is the primary with GCP and Azure as alternatives.
gNMI, NETCONF, and SNMP appear only under Preferred Qualifications, as does graph database experience (Neo4j/Amazon Neptune) and YANG data modeling.
The role is onsite in Santa Clara, CA with up to 15% travel; remote=false.
No degree requirement is stated in the posting.
The posting notes export-control and U.S. Person requirements, but does not gate on a formal security clearance.
Read the full posting
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