Posted 4 weeks ago

Software Engineer (System Orchestration)

IonQ

Oxford, England, United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Onsite
Full Time
Airflow
Kubernetes
Software Engineering
SQL

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We are looking for an enthusiastic Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team in System Software at Oxford Ionics. In this role, you will be responsible for building 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
You will own features end to end, from the API through to the rollout onto real machines. You’ll play an important part in shaping the services that support our work in building the world’s most advanced quantum systems. Previous exposure to quantum systems is not required
In this position, you will work on the services that schedule work onto our quantum computers and keep the record of it, supporting the effective delivery of a control plane the whole fleet depends on
You’ll have the opportunity to own real pieces of that system end to end, contributing directly to the success of the System Software function
Build and extend the services that schedule work on our systems and keep the record of it
Build the mechanisms that decide when a system needs re-tuning, and get those calibrations run
Own what we persist: the data model, its migrations, and the code that reads and writes it
Produce the tests and harnesses that let our code be exercised against real hardware and against simulators
Work with the systems teams to roll releases out across the fleet and support them once they are running
Improve the observability of the code you ship
Take part in code review, and improve the APIs our internal users depend on
To be successful, you will need solid programming skills, an interest in the systems that keep long-running machines working, and either experience of a systems programming language or the appetite to learn one. We’re looking for someone who can work comfortably in a Linux environment, cares about what happens to data when a service crashes or a migration goes wrong, and can contribute effectively within a fast moving, highly technical team
A habit of producing appropriate tests and taking part in code review
Comfort working on Linux, and debugging a service that is already running
Some exposure to networked services and APIs, such as gRPC or REST
Exposure to schedulers, job queues or workflow engines - Celery, Airflow, Temporal, Slurm or similar
Strong programming skills in one or more mainstream programming languages
Experience with a systems programming language. Our System Orchestration layer is written in Rust, so either some Rust experience or the appetite to learn it
Comfort with relational databases and SQL; we use PostgreSQL
Good communication skills both within software and across disciplines
Additional useful experience would include async programming, containers and Kubernetes, closed-loop systems that act on measured state, and scientific computing or research facilities