Senior Staff Software Architect – Network Monitoring Platform

Location: Onsite or Hybrid in Santa Clara / Bay Area, CA
Travel: Up to 15%, domestic or international.
Job ID: 1558

The Role: 

We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Architect to lead the design and evolution of our next-generation Network Monitoring Platform. 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.

In this role, you will own the end-to-end architecture of a high-scale, data-intensive network monitoring platform — from data modeling and ingestion pipelines to cloud-native deployment. You are a hands-on technical leader who writes production code, drives critical architectural decisions, and has deep experience building systems that monitor large fleets of devices at scale. The ideal candidate brings strong Go and/or Rust expertise and thrives at the intersection of systems engineering and distributed data platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Architect cloud-native ingestion and processing pipelines capable of handling telemetry from hundreds of thousands of devices, leveraging streaming platforms and time-series storage at scale.
• Define and own the platform’s unified YANG-based data model, spanning device configuration state, operational telemetry, and topology relationships across heterogeneous network environments, serving as the authoritative schema from which ingestion pipelines, storage structures, and API contracts are derived.
• Write and review production-quality code in Go and/or Rust for performance-critical platform components including collectors, aggregators, and real-time processing engines.
• Define and enforce data partitioning, sharding, and retention strategies to sustain high-volume device event streams while meeting latency and durability requirements.
• Lead the design of cloud-native deployment patterns (Kubernetes, service mesh, autoscaling) to ensure the platform operates reliably at global scale across multi-cloud environments.
• Evaluate and drive adoption of purpose-fit technologies — time-series databases, graph stores, stream processors — with a focus on operational scalability and long-term maintainability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate monitoring requirements into platform capabilities, ensuring architectural decisions are reflected in roadmap milestones and engineering specifications.
• Mentor senior engineers through architecture reviews, coding standards, and hands-on technical guidance, raising the bar for platform quality and engineering practices.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of experience in software or platform architecture, with at least 5 years leading architecture for large-scale, data-intensive distributed systems.
• Substantial experience building and operating device monitoring systems at scale — with direct exposure to telemetry ingestion pipelines, fleet management, and real-time alerting across large device populations.
• Proven hands-on coding ability; production experience with Go and/or Rust is strongly preferred for this role.
• Deep expertise in data modeling for high-volume systems, including schema design, time-series storage (InfluxDB/Timescale), event streaming (Kafka/Kinesis), and graph data models for network topology.
• Solid understanding of cloud-native application design — including containerization, Kubernetes orchestration, microservices, and cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proficiency in both Go and Rust, with a track record of shipping production services in at least one of these languages.
• Background in network management platforms or network equipment vendors (e.g., Juniper, Cisco, Nokia), with familiarity with telemetry protocols such as gNMI, NETCONF, or SNMP.
• Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS platforms where data isolation, schema evolution, and scalability across customer tiers are first-class concerns.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or observability projects, or published technical writing on distributed systems and data engineering topics.
• Familiarity with techniques relevant to high-throughput data collection.

The approximate base salary range for this position is $216,136 - $282,978. The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.