Principal Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Architect

IonQ, Inc. [NYSE: IONQ] is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.

Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our quantum computing services are available through all major cloud providers, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before.  

We are looking for a Principal Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Architect to join our Platform Engineering Team.

As a Principal Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Architect, you'll be part of a cross-functional team whose mission is to lead IonQ on its journey to build the world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems.

The Principal Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Architect is the senior technical IC and Architecture Board Chair of the Platform Engineering Team, responsible for shaping the technical vision for secure, resilient, and scalable infrastructure platforms at global scale across mission-critical services. This role brings deep experience across cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, security architecture, SRE, and operational transformation, connecting technical decisions to business outcomes and long-term platform strategy.

In this role, you will be responsible for defining and evolving a highly available and secure infrastructure across AWS and on-premises hardware, including foundational platform services, operational standards, and engineering practices that support reliability, scalability, compliance, backup and restore readiness, and disaster recovery across business-critical and customer-facing workloads. This role works closely with engineering, security, and product teams as a senior technical leader, shaping the platform roadmap, guiding architectural decisions through the Architecture Board, and mentoring senior engineers across the organization while serving as a trusted architecture authority.

The ideal candidate is someone who understands this is a hands-on role. The Principal Architect writes production infrastructure code (OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible), builds proof-of-concept implementations, debugs complex distributed system failures, and leads by example through daily technical execution — not solely through review and oversight.

• →12–15 years of professional experience in Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, System Engineering, or SRE, including 8 years of experience building, scaling, or transforming Platform Engineering or SRE organizations.
• →10 years of experience operating production environments with real customer workloads at scale, alongside 10 years of experience in highly available, secure, and scalable distributed systems design.
• →10 years of experience with AWS Cloud Architecture and Services (multi-account, multi-region) and 5 years of experience with AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and Service Control Policies.
• →8 years of experience in cloud networking (VPC design, Transit Gateway, routing, segmentation, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6).
• →6 years of experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible) and 5 years of experience in Kubernetes Platform Architecture (EKS, Bottlerocket, ARM64/Graviton, FIPS).
• →6 years of experience with security controls and cloud security (WAF, DDoS mitigation, layered edge/app protection), paired with 6 years of experience in network security, encryption, authentication, authorization, and identity-centric access.
• →5 years of experience in backup, restore, and disaster recovery for mission-critical platforms.

• Relevant certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect Professional, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, CISSP, or CCSP, and demonstrated industry impact through technical publications, conference presentations, or significant open-source contributions.
• Experience with multi-cloud infrastructure management (AWS, GCP, Azure), on-premises network architecture (Juniper, Cisco, Ubiquiti), and hybrid cloud connectivity.
• Expertise in distributed systems, microservice architectures, container orchestration (Kubernetes), continuous deployment at enterprise scale, global database architectures, and distributed data systems.
• Deep expertise in Linux/Unix internals, file systems, system tuning, administration, networking, and troubleshooting across network, application, and distributed service layers.
• Experience designing and operating centralized identity platforms (SSO, IAM federation, OAuth/OIDC) within regulated environments or compliance-driven infrastructure at enterprise or federal scale (financial services, healthcare, federal/defense).
• Experience with AWS Fault Injection Simulator, resilience testing frameworks, and exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, GPU-based workloads, or agentic AI platform services.
• Experience leading platform or infrastructure teams through transformational change or hyper-growth phases.
• Track record of TCO optimization, capacity planning, and infrastructure capital planning for global deployments.

If you are interested in being a part of our team and mission, we encourage you to apply!