Senior Staff Technical Program Manager - Compute Platform

IonQ•Bothell, WA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The Compute Platform team at IonQ is responsible for transforming quantum capability into quantum utility by developing the APIs, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and application layer that connect IonQ's Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) to users. This role is crucial as it enables the powerful hardware to be accessible and functional. IonQ is seeking a Senior Staff Technical Program Manager to lead cross-functional programs focused on the application platform, developer tooling, and compiler stack. This individual will report directly to the VP of the department and will have program-level decision-making authority and ownership. The role involves working across four engineering teams and approximately forty engineers, managing multiple concurrent programs in an environment of high ambiguity, as the challenges of commercializing quantum computers are still being solved. This is a high-visibility position with responsibility for some of the company's top priorities, requiring regular interaction with senior technical leadership and key partners.

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

Nice To Haves

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!

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