IonQ is looking to develop the world's most powerful full-stack quantum computer based on trapped-ion technology, and is seeking a Senior Staff SDN Control Plane Lead to design the 'brain' of the quantum network—a centralized controller capable of managing high-fidelity entanglement resources in real-time.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Other
- 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.
- 10% travel required.
- U.S. Person status for export controls and government contracts work, or obtaining any necessary license.
- Access to technology that is subject to U.S. export control and government contract restrictions.
