Senior Staff Technical Program Manager - Compute Platform

IonQ · Bothell, Washington, United States; Boulder, Colorado, United States; College Park, Maryland, United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $180,000 – $270,000
  • Posted 2026-09-16
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

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 role will work onsite at our office located in Bothell, WA, Boulder, CO, or College Park, MD
Travel: As needed.
Job ID: 1859

The Role:

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience standing up program tracking and reporting infrastructure from scra

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