SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
IonQ is the world's leading quantum computing platform and merchant supplier, delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. The company recently achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity and set a world record in quantum computing performance. IonQ's customers and partners include Amazon Web Services and AstraZeneca.
The Compute Platform team turns quantum capability into quantum utility by building the APIs, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and application layer that connect IonQ's quantum processing units (QPUs) to users. This role is a Senior Staff Technical Program Manager reporting directly to the VP of the department, carrying program-level decision-making authority.
You will lead cross-functional programs across the application platform, developer tooling, and compiler stack, working across four engineering teams and approximately forty engineers. You'll support multiple concurrent programs and operate in high ambiguity—turning quantum computers into commercial products is a problem nobody has finished solving. This is a high-visibility role with ownership of some of the company's highest-priority initiatives, routinely interacting with senior technical leadership and key partners.
Key responsibilities include: owning end-to-end delivery of IonQ's application platform, developer tools, and compiler roadmap; partnering with engineering leadership to turn technical vision into incremental milestones; building and running timelines, tracking, and reporting that teams actually use; keeping systems of record honest by reconciling PRDs, trackers, and Jira; making invisible work visible (on-call burden, sustaining load, technical debt); diving into details on long-pole problems; surfacing unresolved risks early; managing dependencies across internal and external teams; writing and presenting data-driven status to senior leadership; and helping turn off-roadmap engineer ideas into formal proposals for prioritization.
The role emphasizes technical program management in a genuinely ambiguous environment, with a focus on delivery rigor, risk management, and leveraging AI tools as force multipliers.
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
- Ability to turn diffuse problems into specific, minimal, assignable asks
- Technical fluency to engage engineering leads directly on scoping and tradeoffs; comfort reading and reasoning about code
- Willingness to re-baseline against reality rather than defend dates that have stopped being true; judgment to distinguish motivating targets from fiction
- Experience building or automating reconciliation between planning docs and ticket systems; treat drift as a defect
- Fluency moving between fast-cycle delivery and longer-horizon program building
- AI as a core part of how you work; experience building agent-driven workflows for program management
- Experience in customer-facing technical roles
- Highly effective written and verbal communication
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience standing up program tracking and reporting infrastructure from scratch; designed a team's operating cadence and consulted affected people before changing it
- Customer-facing technical experience
- Capacity and staffing modeling from conflicting inputs, with discipline to label unknowns as unknown
- 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 (no quantum background required; training provided)
