Senior Staff Technical Program Manager - Compute Platform at IonQ in Bothell, Washington, United States; Boulder, Colorado, United States; College Park, Maryland, United States

Job description

• Compute Platform turns quantum capability into quantum utility by building the APIs, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and application layer that connect IonQ's QPUs to users. Without it, powerful hardware goes nowhere.
• We’re hiring a Senior Staff Technical Program Manager to lead cross-functional programs across the application platform, developer tooling, and compiler stack. You’ll report directly to the VP of the department and carry program-level decision-making authority, with the ownership that comes with it.
• You’ll work across four engineering teams and roughly forty engineers, supporting multiple concurrent programs. You'll operate in high ambiguity: the problems here don't have established playbooks, because turning quantum computers into commercial products is a problem nobody has finished solving. If that sounds like the interesting part, we should talk.
• This is a high-visibility role with ownership of some of the company's highest-priority initiatives. As such, this role will routinely interact with senior technical leadership and key partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery of IonQ's application platform, developer tools, and compiler roadmap, spanning numerous cross-functional development threads
• Partner with engineering leadership to turn technical vision into incremental milestones that ship, identifying risks and mitigations before they become schedule problems
• Build and run the timelines, tracking, and reporting that teams actually use, where the measure of success is adoption; you’ll have access to cutting edge AI tools as a force multiplier
• Keep the systems of record honest. Our plans live across PRDs, trackers, and Jira, and when those drift apart the program is flying blind. You'll close that gap and automate the checking
• Make invisible work visible: on-call burden, sustaining load, and technical debt tracked as rigorously as feature delivery
• Dive into the details on long-pole problems. When a program stalls, you're in the weeds with the team
• Surface unresolved risks early, before you have a full solution or complete stakeholder alignment. We'd rather hear it messy and on time
• Manage dependencies across internal and external teams, technical and non-technical
• Write and present concise, data-driven status to senior leadership
• When engineers have great ideas off-roadmap, help turn them into formal proposals for potential prioritization

Requirements

• 8+ years managing technical programs and delivering against aggressive timelines
• Track record leading technical teams through genuine ambiguity, not just executing a defined plan
• Experience in developer tools, SDKs, compilers, or adjacent platform software
• A habit of turning diffuse problems into specific, minimal, assignable asks
• Technical fluency to engage engineering leads directly on scoping and tradeoffs, and comfort reading and reasoning about code
• Willingness to re-baseline against reality rather than defend dates that have stopped being true, and the judgment to tell a target that motivates from one that just generates fiction
• You've built or automated the reconciliation between planning docs and ticket systems, and you treat drift between them as a defect
• Fluency moving between fast-cycle delivery and longer-horizon program building as the situation demands
• AI as a core part of how you work. You've built agent-driven workflows for program management and want to push that much further
• Experience in customer-facing technical roles
• Highly effective written and verbal communication
• Experience standing up program tracking and reporting infrastructure from scratch. You've designed a team's operating cadence, not just scheduled it, and polled the people affected before changing it
• Customer-facing technical experience
• Capacity and staffing modeling from conflicting inputs, with the discipline to label an unknown as unknown
• A demonstrated ability to earn technical stakeholders' trust through consistency and results
• Genuine enthusiasm for reading and writing PRDs and ERDs
• Working knowledge of quantum computing, though no quantum background is required. We'll teach you!

Skills

Required

• Technical program management
• Comfort reading and reasoning about code
• Re-baseline against reality
• AI as a core part of how you work

Preferred

• Customer-facing technical experience
• Working knowledge of quantum computing

Benefits

• The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.
• If this role has a commission structure, the compensation range below just reflects the base compensation range.
• Compensation will vary based on individual factors such as education, qualifications, and experience of the final candidate(s), specific office location, and calibration against relevant market data and internal team equity. Posted base salary figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. Our benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, matching 401(k), unlimited PTO and paid holidays, parental/adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided when a candidate receives an offer of employment.