This role suits an experienced security or platform engineer with extensive production experience building systems powered by large language models who wants to lead technical adoption remotely or from a US office. The position is a senior individual contributor role at IonQ, focusing on enterprise AI infrastructure and security enablement.
Role Overview
IonQ is hiring a Senior Staff AI Security Lead for a full-time position that can be performed remotely within the United States, or onsite and hybrid from company offices. The person in this role will build enterprise AI infrastructure for security operations and drive technical adoption across threat intelligence, vulnerability management, GRC, and security engineering. Travel is required up to 10 percent of the time.
Key Responsibilities
Design and build shared security platforms for AI application development, including model gateways, routing, authentication, authorization, secrets handling, rate limiting, cost attribution, and audit logging.
Establish reusable components and patterns for agentic workflows such as tool and MCP server integration, sandboxed execution, least-privilege scoping, and human-in-the-loop gates.
Connect security knowledge bases to AI systems through well-governed retrieval pipelines with access controls and data classification enforcement.
Build evaluation harnesses, regression suites, and observability tools to monitor output quality, latency, cost, hallucination rates, and drift.
Implement guardrails against prompt injection, data exfiltration, insecure tool use, and supply-chain risks.
Collaborate with detection engineering, incident response, threat intel, GRC, and security operations to identify practical AI use cases and eliminate weak ideas early.
Deliver high-visibility flagship applications and run enablement programs like workshops, office hours, and brown-bags.
Partner with Legal, Privacy, and Compliance to define acceptable-use policies and risk frameworks.
Requirements
Eight or more years of experience in security engineering, platform engineering, or a related technical field, featuring substantial hands-on software development.
Demonstrated experience building and operating production systems utilizing large language models beyond prototypes.
Strong software engineering fundamentals with fluency in Python or an equivalent language, including API design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Deep understanding of security engineering principles such as identity and access management, secrets management, logging, detection, and secure software development.
Working knowledge of AI-specific risks like prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, and insecure agent tool use.
Proven track record of driving technical change and consensus across an organization through influence.
Clear written and verbal communication skills tailored for both engineers and executives.
Nice to Have
Experience with agent frameworks, orchestration, and Model Context Protocol or comparable tool-use standards.
Experience building evaluation frameworks or LLM observability tooling.
Background in security operations, detection engineering, or incident response.
Experience with retrieval systems, embeddings, vector databases, and knowledge pipeline design.
Familiarity with AI governance and assurance frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, or OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.
Experience fine-tuning or evaluating open-weight models for domain-specific tasks.
Prior experience as an early or founding hire on a platform or capability that scaled organization-wide.
Skills and Tools
Python
Large Language Models
AWS, GCP, Azure
Model Context Protocol
Vector Databases
Retrieval Systems
LLM Observability Tooling
Salary and Benefits
Salary range is $180,000 to $225,000 USD.
About the Company
IonQ is a quantum platform and merchant supplier delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. The company operates globally with headquarters in College Park, Maryland, and office locations across multiple states and international countries.
How to Apply
Candidates should apply on the official company careers page.
