Senior HPC Platform Engineer

Senior HPC Platform Engineer

This role is based out of our College Park, MD, Boulder, CO, or Bothell, WA offices. We offer a hybrid work model, allowing for remote work a few days per week. Travel:
Up to 15%, domestic or international.

We're looking for a Senior HPC Platform Engineer to join our Infrastructure Team. Our mission is to build and operate the internal high-performance computing platform that IonQ's researchers and application developers rely on to advance quantum computing.

In this role, you'll help design, develop, and support the software that makes our HPC platform both easy to use and easy to operate. That spans user-facing web applications and self-service tooling for workflows such as interactive development, batch jobs, and CI/CD pipelines, as well as operational tooling for the Infrastructure team — telemetry and observability, service-level (SLO) reporting, and automation for provisioning and managing systems.

You'll work closely with the rest of the Infrastructure Team to integrate the HPC platform with other tooling and systems across IonQ. As an early member of a growing team, you'll have significant room to shape the platform's architecture and engineering practices. This role will be a great fit if you enjoy working alongside researchers and want your work to directly accelerate scientific computing.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and support a high-performance computing software platform to enable quantum computing research, engineering, control, and application development.
• Build user-facing web applications and self-service tooling that let researchers discover, access, and run their work on the platform — across interactive development, batch jobs, and CI/CD pipelines on both on-premises and cloud systems.
• Build operational tooling and services for the Infrastructure team, including telemetry and observability pipelines, service-level (SLO) dashboards, and automation for provisioning and managing systems.
• Write well-tested, maintainable code and take part in design and code review; help shape the platform's architecture and engineering practices as it and the team grow.
• Support IonQ's internal researchers and software developers as they run simulations and other workloads.
• Build technical relationships with stakeholders across teams running a wide variety of workloads.
• Contribute to clear documentation and user guides so the platform is easy to adopt and increasingly self-service.
• Self-manage your projects, priorities, and deadlines; identify, track, and mitigate roadblocks and technical risks.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent practical experience — non-traditional backgrounds are welcome and encouraged!
• 5+ years of software development experience, especially in systems automation, backend services, or platform tooling.
• Proficiency with scripting and programming languages such as Python, Go, and Bash.
• Experience building and maintaining backend services, APIs, or web applications.
• Experience with Linux container tools such as Docker, Podman, Singularity, or Enroot.
• Comfort with Git or other version control systems for managing source code and system configurations.
• Experience delivering projects in a fast-moving, sometimes ambiguous environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience developing Linux infrastructure software and software deployment platforms.
• Configuration-management and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible or Terraform, across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Building observability and monitoring with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, and instrumenting systems against SLIs/SLOs.
• Front-end or full-stack development for user-facing dashboards and self-service portals; experience with Open OnDemand is a plus.
• Experience developing and running CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with HPC workload schedulers such as Slurm, PBS, or Grid Engine.
• Experience running web services and other long-running containerized workloads with Kubernetes.
• Experience developing with NVIDIA GPUs or other accelerators.
• A research-computing background supporting an academic, national-lab, or industry research community.
• Exposure to quantum…