Principal SRE Engineer

ID Quantique (IDQ) as part of IONQ, is a global leader in quantum-safe communications and quantum detection systems. We provide solutions to protect governments, telecommunication infrastructures, and banking & financial institutions from the “harvest-now, decrypt-later” threat, delivering both terrestrial and space-based quantum-safe networks in live operation globally. Our Quantum Detection Systems push the limits of single-photon detection, powering breakthroughs in quantum communication, sensing, computing, and ultra-sensitive imaging in partnership with top researchers and tech innovators worldwide.

What to expect

The Platform Engineering team builds, secures and operates scalable infrastructure supporting cloud-managed SaaS products with on-premises components deployed at customer sites.

As our Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will provide the technical leadership for reliability across our global platform. You will define the strategy, standards and operating model that ensure highly available, resilient and secure services, while remaining hands-on with the design and operation of the technologies that underpin our production environments.

Working closely with Architecture, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations and Product Development, you will drive a culture of observability, automation and continuous improvement, ensuring issues are identified and resolved before they impact customers.

• Define and lead the reliability strategy for Tier 1 and Tier 2 production services, including service-level objectives, error budgets, observability, resilience, disaster recovery and cloud security.

• Design and operate observability platforms, lead chaos engineering and disaster recovery initiatives, improve the reliability of PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, Kafka and OpenSearch, and deliver AI Ops capabilities including predictive monitoring, automated remediation and self-healing.

• Lead major incident response, on-call operations and global escalation, while mentoring engineers and establishing engineering standards adopted across the organisation.

What you'll be doing

You will own the reliability, resilience and operational excellence of our cloud platform and production services, embedding reliability principles into architectural decisions and platform design. You'll establish observability standards covering metrics, logs, distributed tracing and profiling, while governing service-level objectives and error budgets across engineering teams.

You will lead resilience engineering through chaos testing, disaster recovery planning and validated failover exercises, co-own cloud security posture with DevSecOps, and ensure the reliability of our critical data and streaming platforms. Working across multiple engineering disciplines, you will also optimise platform efficiency through automation, AI-driven operations and continuous operational improvement.

• Own production reliability, observability, service-level objectives, error budgets, resilience, backup and disaster recovery, cloud security and platform governance across all critical services.

• Lead incident command, executive communications, post-incident reviews, on-call operations and global escalation, while delivering predictive monitoring, automated remediation and self-healing capabilities.

• Partner with Architecture, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations and Product Development to establish engineering standards, mentor engineers and deliver a shared reliability roadmap.

What you'll bring

You are an experienced Site Reliability Engineering leader with more than 15 years of production engineering experience and recent hands-on responsibility for large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems running on AWS or GCP.

You have successfully designed and operated observability platforms, implemented service-level objective programmes and delivered measurable improvements in availability, reliability and mean time to recovery. You have led high-severity production incidents, planned and executed resilience testing and disaster recovery exercises, and influenced engineering practices across multiple teams through technical leadership and mentoring.

• 15+ years of production engineering experience with recent hands-on responsibility for large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP, including ownership of observability, service-level objectives and error budgets.

• Proven experience leading resilience initiatives, validated disaster recovery and failover testing, together with command of high-severity production incidents and measurable reliability improvements.

• Demonstrated technical leadership through architecture reviews, governance, mentoring, coaching and engineering standards adopted across multiple teams and services.

You'll be a great fit with

You have deep expertise across cloud infrastructure, platform engineering and cloud security, with practical experience securing distributed production environments through cloud security posture management, runtime vulnerability detection and automated policy enforcement.

You understand how to balance reliability, security, networking and operational efficiency at scale. You have experience implementing AI-powered operational capabilities, applying FinOps principles to optimise infrastructure, and designing highly available distributed systems that deliver exceptional resilience and performance.

• Proven experience with cloud security posture management, workload protection, policy-as-code, secure-by-default infrastructure and automated security enforcement across cloud-native platforms and CI/CD pipelines.

• Hands-on expertise with AI traffic management through LLM gateways, capacity planning, resource rightsising, FinOps-based optimisation, autonomous operations, predictive alerting and self-healing platforms.

• Deep knowledge of networking, routing, load balancing, connectivity resilience and distributed systems, with the ability to integrate networking, security and reliability into scalable platform architectures.

What We Offer

· A role at one of the fastest growing and most exciting Quantum companies in the world.

· A competitive compensation scheme, benefits package and equity plan. All designed to reward excellence.

· Flexible work models that let you balance your life, your family, and your career.

· Ongoing training and development to keep your skills sharp and your growth on track.

· A career development plan within the IonQ group’s companies

· A dynamic, close-knit environment where you collaborate with a global team of experts.

· A performance-driven culture built on trust, teamwork, and shared ambition.

ID Quantique/ IonQ is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by law.