Staff Software Engineer, System Orchestration

We are looking for a highly technical Staff Software Engineer to join our System Orchestration team in System Software at Oxford Ionics. In this role, you will be responsible for building and operating the software that keeps our systems calibrated, decides what they do next and keeps the record of what they did, contributing to the team's mission of keeping our quantum computers running useful work around the clock.

The trapped-ion quantum computers we are building will control 10,000 ions within two years, and all of that has to be kept in tune - settings that drift over minutes, hours and days. Without it a computer does not stop; it quietly starts producing invalid output.

Calibration routines, scientists' experiments and customer workloads all compete for physical hardware, and our team builds the control plane that arbitrates that: it schedules and prioritises programs, hands exclusive access to one at a time and takes it back cooperatively, streams results while a program is still running, and keeps the record of everything that ran.

It runs on every quantum computer in our fleet. Its job is to keep that machine busy and productive: running quantum programs rather than waiting in between, and running them in spec - on a machine still hitting the fidelity it is meant to hit.

The ambition is for that to run without a person in the loop: machines that assess their own readiness, call for the calibrations they need, and keep a full history of how they were tuned. You'd work closely with the runtime team who own real-time control, the systems teams who build and maintain our quantum computers, and the operators and scientists who run them.

This is a hands-on engineering role: you would be writing this software alongside our other staff engineers, not directing others who write it. You'll play an important part in shaping the services that support our work in building the world's most advanced quantum systems. Previous exposure to quantum systems is not required.

Responsibilities

In this position, you will work across the services that make up the control plane, supporting the effective delivery of a system every machine in the fleet depends on. You'll have the opportunity to remove whole classes of failure and raise the bar for the engineers around you, contributing directly to the success of the System Software function.

Key responsibilities include

Take on the problems that span the whole control plane - the durability and recovery contracts the rest of the design rests on. Make a machine's own assessment of its readiness something the rest of the control plane can rely on.

Do the deep diagnosis of failures that only appear on a live system, under real load. Remove whole classes of failure across the fleet, rather than instances of them. Draw the boundaries between our services, settle them in writing, and move the code across them y...

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