Principal Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Architect

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year technical vision and end-to-end architecture across AWS and on-premises infrastructure, producing high-level designs for hybrid cloud connectivity.
• Architect highly available, fault-tolerant systems and drive proactive resilience strategies including chaos engineering, failure simulations, and comprehensive recovery/restore testing.
• Lead infrastructure security designs utilizing network segmentation, zero-trust principles, and boundary protection, ensuring compliance with SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and FedRAMP frameworks.
• Maintain core platform services including identity, networking, multi-region deployments, physical servers, on-premises network gear (Juniper, Cisco, Ubiquiti), and runtime controls for agentic AI platforms.
• Enforce Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) standards and chair the Architecture Board to align technical governance and hold tie-breaking authority over engineering standards.
• Establish incident response frameworks, lead critical escalations, and configure observability stacks or alerting systems to optimize platform reliability and restoration times.
• Align the multi-year technical roadmap with business outcomes, capacity planning, and TCO optimization while mentoring senior technical leaders across the organization.
• Promote industry thought leadership by representing the organization through external speaking engagements, publications, patents, or open-source contributions.
• Execute daily technical tasks hands-on by writing production code (OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible), implementing IAM/encryption controls, and debugging complex distributed system failures.

Requirements

• 12-15 years of professional experience in Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, System Engineering, or SRE, including 8 y

Benefits

Additional Information

About IonQ: 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. Location: Onsite or Hybrid in Santa Clara / Bay Area, CA Travel: Up to 25%, Domestic & International Job ID: 1648

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