Senior Research Software Engineer at IonQ (Boston, USA)
Job Description
IonQ is hiring a Senior Research Software Engineer in Boston to build and maintain the software its quantum scientists rely on every day, from lab data acquisition and automated equipment calibration to CI/CD and observability.
At a glance
- Role: Senior Research Software Engineer
- Where: Boston, Massachusetts office
- Pay: US$145,920–191,047 base, plus bonus and equity
- Experience: 5+ years in software engineering
- Apply: open until filled (re-checked 11 October 2026)
About the research software engineer role
- Develop, maintain and support the R&D software scientists use, keeping it stable, fast and reliable
- Own the development lifecycle for R&D codebases: triaging bugs, fixing regressions and improving code health
- Improve observability with logging, metrics, tracing and alerting
- Build back-end and front-end systems for R&D data acquisition, and CI/CD pipelines
- Design systems for automated calibration and bring-up of lab equipment
- Review scientists’ code and help make R&D software more self-service
What IonQ is looking for
- A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
- 5+ years of professional software engineering on complex, cross-functional systems
- Strong Python, and comfort debugging below it: concurrency, async, networking protocols and performance
- Experience owning production software end to end, building CI/CD pipelines and writing clear documentation
Nice to have
- 8+ years of software experience, ideally supporting research teams
- Software for hardware control, automation or data acquisition
- Mentoring and technical leadership
- Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure), DevOps practices and database design
Pay and location
The approximate base salary is US$145,920–191,047, plus bonus, equity and benefits. The role is based at IonQ’s Boston office.
How to apply
Apply through the official IonQ job posting. IonQ’s posting does not give a closing date, so the role is open until filled; ResearchJobs.in will re-check this listing on 11 October 2026. Check the posting for location and work-authorisation details before you apply.
See all our quantum technology jobs, or browse more research jobs on ResearchJobs.in.
Hiring institution: IonQ
Official advertisement: job-boards.greenhouse.io
How to prepare for this application
- Lab software: prepare an example of software you wrote to control instruments or acquire data, and how you made it reliable.
- Python internals: expect questions on asyncio, threading, profiling and networking.
- CI/CD and observability: describe pipelines and monitoring you set up and the problems they caught.
- Working with scientists: give examples of reviewing research code constructively.
- Quantum context: a little reading on how trapped-ion systems are calibrated will help you ask good questions.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) builds trapped-ion quantum computers and describes itself as a quantum platform company working across computing, networking, sensing and security. It is headquartered in College Park, Maryland, with operations in several US states and in Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada and the United Kingdom.
