Staff Site Reliability Engineer
ionq
Santa Clara, CA, United States Posted October 11, 2026
Check how well your resume matches this job
Salary Range
$152,000 - $228,000
Job Description
Join our Platform Engineering team as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer. In this role, you will be responsible for ensuring the stability and reliability of our cloud-managed SaaS products. You will set the technical direction for reliability across regions and services, own the reliability strategy, and define the standards and mechanisms that guide production operations. You will also design and operate observability platforms, lead high-severity incident response, and improve the reliability of stateful and streaming platforms. This is a hands-on role that requires a strong focus on service continuity and customer experience.
- Define and implement the reliability strategy, standards, and mechanisms that guide production operations, ensuring service continuity and customer experience.
- Design and operate observability platforms, govern service-level objectives, lead high-severity incident response, and build resilience and disaster-recovery automation.
- Mentor engineers at different seniority levels, set standards adopted across teams, and align Architecture, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations, and Product Development behind a shared reliability roadmap.
- Preferred Qualifications:
- Strong experience prioritizing risk using identity, workload, and exposure-path context to focus remediation on issues that materially increase attack likelihood and operational impact
- Hands-on, recent experience operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP
- Demonstrated ownership of reliability outcomes with measurable results, such as availability, mean time to recovery, and error-budget adherence
- Observability ownership — has instrumented production systems and governed service-level objectives and error budgets, not only installed dashboards
- Experience with autonomous remediation and self-healing workflows powered by AIOps, including Amazon Bedrock Agent Core or equivalent agentic automation frameworks
- Resilience practice — has designed and executed failure experiments or disaster-recovery exercises with real failover validation
- Proven production experience with cloud security posture management, runtime vulnerability detection, and workload protection across cloud and distributed environments
- Hands-on experience in capacity management, resource rightsizing, efficiency engineering, and practical cost optimization based on FinOps principles
- Experience with load-balancing design and operations, including health-based failover, global traffic management, and performance optimization for highly available services
- 7+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on reliability work
- Experience with AI traffic management via an LLM gateway, including request routing, policy enforcement, rate limiting, model fallback, latency optimization, cost controls, and observability for multi-model or multi-provider environments
- Ability to connect networking, security, and reliability considerations into cohesive platform design decisions that improve resilience, performance, and operability
- Evidence of multi-team technical leadership through standards, review, coaching, and mechanisms adopted beyond one service or team
- Incident command — has personally commanded serious SEV1/SEV2 incidents and driven root cause through to a systemic fix
Required Skills
Similar Jobs
How to apply
You apply on ionq’s own careers site. No account needed.
Apply on company siteUpload your resume and ARes scores it against this job in a few seconds. No account needed.
Already have access? Sign inAbout ionq
See every open role at ionq on ARes.
More Jobs at ionq