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IonQ · 20 hours ago

Senior Staff SDN Control Plane Lead - Quantum Networking

Bothell, Washington, United States

Full-time

Onsite

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$195K/yr - $255K/yr

8+ years exp

IonQ is developing the world's most powerful full-stack quantum computer based on trapped-ion technology. They are seeking a Senior Staff SDN Control Plane Lead to design a centralized controller for managing high-fidelity entanglement resources in real-time, leveraging experience with large-scale network topologies and advanced scheduling.

ComputerElectronicsFinanceInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyMobile AppsQuantum ComputingSoftware

Growth Opportunities

No H1B

U.S. Citizen Only

Responsibilities

Lead the design of the centralized software-defined network controller, maintaining a real-time global view of network telemetry, topology and available resources

Architect the network orchestrator to handle time-dependent entanglement resource requests using advanced scheduling algorithms

Develop path-calculation logic to consider loss budgets and delays across the quantum network

Implement conflict prevention to ensure reservations do not collide on the same devices or links

Engineer the control plane to support automated hardware configuration and state recovery

Qualification

SDN Control Plane architectureC/C++ proficiencyDistributed systems experienceGoRust proficiencyHigh-performance systems designTeam leadershipProblem-solvingCommunication skills

Required

Minimum 8+ years of experience in network engineering or distributed systems, with significant time spent leading the architecture of SDN controllers or complex resource schedulers

Minimum of a Master's in Computer Science, Networking, or a related field

Expertise in designing centralized control planes for high-availability systems with strict performance constraints

Proficiency in C/C++. Go, or Rust for performance-critical processes

Preferred

Expertise in SDN Control Plane architectures

Deep knowledge of optical network control planes and the management of physical-layer metrics (e.g., signal-to-noise ratio or loss budgets) within a software layer

Experience designing networking or high-performance systems where timing resolution and latency budgets are mission-critical

Proven ability to build global topology managers that handle dynamic resource availability and complex hardware constraints in real-time