Staff Site Reliability Engineer at IonQ
Santa Clara, CA
$163,430–$213,972from the description
Jul 17, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role focused on end-to-end production reliability for large-scale cloud services. The position owns SLO programs, observability infrastructure, disaster-recovery testing, and high-severity incident command, while also building AIOps-driven self-healing workflows and guiding reliability standards across multiple engineering teams. It suits an experienced engineer with a strong track record of measurable reliability outcomes and cross-team technical leadership.
Staff level · 7+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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 (7)
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is titled Staff SRE and is deeply hands-on — designing and operating observability platforms, building resilience/DR automation, and writing AIOps workflows — which maps to 15-1252 Software Developers. However, a meaningful portion of the work (on-call management, incident command, cloud security posture monitoring) leans toward 15-1244 operations; 15-1244 is listed as the runner-up.
The 'Staff' seniority is supported both by the explicit title and by the genuine cross-team, org-wide scope described (setting standards adopted across teams, aligning Architecture, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind a shared reliability roadmap) — this is not merely a long-tenured Senior role.
AWS and GCP are listed together as 'AWS or GCP' in the requirements section; AWS is named first and listed as the primary skill with GCP as an alternative.
Cloud security posture management appears in both the Responsibilities section (as a co-ownership duty) and the Preferred Qualifications section. Because the Preferred Qualifications section explicitly frames it as preferred, and the Responsibilities framing describes it as a shared/co-owned duty rather than a sole hard gate, it is treated as preferred.
Amazon Bedrock Agent Core is listed under Preferred Qualifications with 'or equivalent agentic automation frameworks,' so it is preferred; alternatives are not enumerated because the posting itself uses an open-ended 'equivalent' qualifier with no other named tool.
Up to 25% travel is required per the posting — not captured in any structured field.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): chaos engineering, incident management, cloud security posture management.
Read the full posting
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