Principal Solutions Architect - Quantum-Safe Networks

About this role

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: This position is US-based and can work onsite or hybrid from one of our offices or fully remote. Travel: Up to 30%, domestic and international Job ID: 1779

The Role:

We are looking for a Principal Solutions Architect to design how networks become quantum-safe — for the largest network operators, enterprises, and government agencies in the world.

Today's networks are secured with cryptography that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will break. Every operator and enterprise will have to inventory their cryptography, make it agile, migrate to post-quantum algorithms, and in the highest-assurance segments complement that with quantum-safe key distribution. Almost nobody knows yet what that architecture actually looks like. That is the problem you will solve — first with customers, on real networks, and then as reusable architectures that shape what IonQ builds.

This role sits deliberately in two places. About half your time is customer-facing: in collaboration with our GTM colleagues, you’ll be leading architecture discussions, designing quantum-safe target architectures and migration paths, running proofs of concept and interoperability tests, and supporting complex pursuits as the technical authority. The other half is design authority, standards work, and providing thought leadership internally and externally: turning what you learn in the field into reference architectures, migration playbooks, standards, whitepapers, blogs, and product requirements that our engineering and product teams build against.

You are equally comfortable in a firewall design review as you are in a discussion about hybrid key exchange and crypto-agility. You can explain to a CISO why their crypto inventory is the hard part, and to a network engineer exactly which IPsec algorithms to use and where they could insert external key material in order to become quantum-safe.

This is not a software architecture role — you will not own a codebase (it’s a plus if you can do some scripting). It is an architecture and customer role: you own designs, decisions, and the technical credibility of IonQ's quantum-safe networking story.

Responsibilities :

• Design quantum-safe target architectures and migration paths for customer networks — spanning WAN and transport, data center and campus, segmentation and access control, key management, and the crypto that underpins all of it.

• Lead technical discovery and architecture workshops with network, security, and infrastructure teams. Assess the current state, identify where cryptography is embedded and where it is brittle, and build a migration plan the customer can actually execute.

• Own the technical thread in complex pursuits: architecture proposals, RFI/RFP responses, security and compliance questions, competitive positioning, and objection handling — in partnership with Sales.

• In collaboration with the Sales Engineers, design and run proofs of concept, interoperability tests, and pilots — including PQC and hybrid key exchange in production-representative network environments and, where relevant, QKD-integrated links — together with our engineering teams and customer staff.

• Translate field learning into reusable reference architectures, migration playbooks, interoperability matrices, and design guides that scale beyond the deals you personally work.

• Serve as the customer's voice in the product process. Bring architectural constraints, integration gaps, and roadmap requirements to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to be actionable, and hold us to them.

• Track how the standards and threat landscape actually move and contribute to them — NIST PQC standards and migration guidance, protocol work in the IETF, national and sector-specific mandates and deadlines — and keep our architectures and guidance ahead of it.

• Partner with Marketing, Corporate Communications, and GTM to build IonQ's technical presence in the networking and security community: talks, papers, blogs, standards bodies, and industry events.

• Raise the technical bar around you — architecture reviews, mentoring, and the design patterns the rest of the team reuses.

Requirements:

• 15+ years designing and securing enterprise and/or service provider networks, in a solutions architecture, network architecture, security architecture, or senior customer-facing engineering capacity.

• Deep (hands-on) knowledge of how networks are built and secured today: routing and switching, IP transport, network segmentation, firewall and access control design, VPN and encryption at the network layer, and Zero Trust principles applied to real infrastructure. Multi-vendor experience (for example, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Nokia) is expected.

• Working knowledge of applied cryptography as it appears in networks: TLS, IPsec, MACsec, PKI and certificate lifecy

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