Freelance Research Software Engineer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Location: This role is based at our Boston, MA office, with the option to work a few days a week in-office.
Travel: Up to 10% domestic
Job ID: 1605

The Role: 

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer. As a Senior Software Engineer, 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 apply your deep technical expertise to build and maintain scalable, reliable, and researcher-friendly software that empowers our scientists to accelerate their research and development efforts in quantum networking, computing, and sensing. You will play a pivotal role in shaping our software architecture, driving SDLC best practices, improving system stability and observability, and mentoring a talented team to deliver innovative solutions that push the boundaries of quantum technology. 

Responsibilities:

• Develop, maintain, and support the research and development (R&D) software used by our scientists, ensuring its stability, performance, and day-to-day reliability.
• Own the general software development lifecycle for our R&D codebases, including triaging and fixing bugs, addressing regressions, and improving long-term code health.
• Improve observability across our R&D software stack (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) so issues are caught early and root-caused quickly.
• Contribute to the design, implementation, and management of our backend and frontend for R&D data acquisition.
• Design, build, and maintain the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure quality and rapid, reliable deployments.
• Design and implement robust systems for the automated calibration and bring-up of lab equipment.
• Review scientist-contributed code, providing constructive feedback and guidance on code cleanliness, architecture, and best practices.
• Interface with other IonQ software teams to ensure alignment and integration across systems.
• Proactively identify opportunities to make R&D software more accessible, scalable, and self-service for scientists. 

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
• 5+ years professional experience in software engineering, including work on complex, cross-functional systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python, and comfort working below it when needed: debugging across the stack, reasoning about concurrency and async, networking protocols, and performance profiling.
• Experience owning the full SDLC for production software, including debugging, incident response, and ongoing maintenance.
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience writing clear, concise, and comprehensive user-facing documentation, including tutorials, API reference guides, and internal knowledge base articles. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional software experience, ideally in a scientific or R&D environment, supporting research teams.
• Experience developing software for hardware control, automation, or data acquisition.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring and providing technical leadership to other engineers.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience with database design and management. 

What success looks like:

• In your first few months, you'll have onboarded across our R&D codebases, started shipping fixes and reviewing scientist contributions, and identified the biggest stability and observability gaps to tackle.
• You act as a trusted partner to the scientists on the team: helping them write and structure code, supporting their tooling and documentation needs, running code reviews focused on software quality (organization, readability, maintainability), and flagging cases where deeper science-related review might be needed. No physics or quantum background required, but genuine interest in supporting research work is essential.
• By the end of your first six months, you'll own the SDLC health of at least one major codebase, with measurably improved observability and faster diagnosis of production issues.
• By the end of your first year, you'll be a recognized technical leader on the team, having driven at least one cross-cutting initiative that improved stability or contributor experience across our stack, and actively mentoring other engineers or scientist contributors. 

The approximate base salary range for this position is $145,920 - $191,047. The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.