Software Engineer, AI Engineer, Python

Quantum is now, and it's built here.

Oxford Ionics, now part of IonQ, is pioneering the next generation of quantum computing. Using our world‑leading trapped‑ion technology, we’re building the most powerful, accurate and reliable quantum systems to tackle problems that today’s supercomputers cannot solve.

Joining Oxford Ionics means becoming part of a global IonQ team that is transforming the future of quantum technology – faster, at scale, and with real‑world impact.

We are looking for a skilled, motivated Software Engineer to join the Software team. This is the team responsible for creating and maintaining the code base and the software infrastructure needed to operate our quantum computer and test systems and to facilitate their research and development. This entails writing and maintaining code that runs on the embedded platforms that power the laboratory hardware, as well as code for regular server and workstation systems.

The team works together with our science teams to enable them to do fast development and experimentation. The team also produces the production‑grade software stack that will allow our future users to run quantum algorithms on our systems.

This is an exciting opportunity to work alongside scientists, engineers, and technicians. See vacuum chambers, cryostats, lasers, and more in action at our on‑site laboratories and play your part in making quantum computing happen.

With support from the rest of the team, you will be expected to productively contribute to the development of our code base. This includes a wide variety of exciting work, from developing our quantum compiler to writing embedded firmware, from designing high‑level APIs as part of our quantum computing stack to advancing our internal development infrastructure and process. We don’t expect you to be an expert in these fields, but you should feel excited about becoming one.

• Python and Rust
• Much of our software is used by our scientists when executing routines on our quantum hardware. The APIs used by the scientists are all Python‑based.
• We are developing a custom‑optimising compiler for quantum circuits written in Rust and Python.
• The firmware components of the instrumentation and control system we use, ARTIQ, are written in Rust. We will be customising and extending this firmware to improve performance and add new features.
• FPGAs and So Cs
• We’ll develop custom hardware and gateware to extend our hard real‑time (