Staff Product Manager, Next-Generation Systems

We are looking for a customer-obsessed, technically deep product manager to build critical pieces of our quantum computing portfolio. As a product manager within IonQ's Quantum Computing product family, you'll be part of a cross-functional team whose mission is to lead IonQ on its journey to build the world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems.

In this role, you'll own the product management of a next-generation hardware program, from early definition through launch, within the broader quantum systems portfolio. You’ll have two main responsibilities: ensuring the market is ready for the new generation, and ensuring the new generation is ready for the market. The first requires aligning how its capabilities will be exposed to customers, when and how it is exposed to internal and external “early access” users, and what key demonstrations and milestones we need to ensure that end users are ready and excited to take advantage of they system as soon as it comes online. The second requires aligning program priorities with product priorities: act as a key stakeholder and team member of the engineering program that is developing the system to negotiate key design targets and requirements, helping manage day-to-day tradeoffs with clear business and customer perspective, and identifying and doing the work necessary to ensure the program is not just a technical success, but a commercial and customer one: export control and compliance, operability and maintainability, compatibility, field deployability, and more.

You will work with customers, external partners, and internal collaborators across Product, Engineering, R&D, Sales, Marketing, and more to establish a vision, identify and prioritize requirements, define a product roadmap, inform go-to-market strategies, and drive them to realization and launch.

We need a self-starting, technically-adept leader to help us continue to move quantum out of the lab and into the world of scientific and commercial utility. This means strength and depth in both technical and business topics, constant curiosity and intellectual humility, and the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with a broad variety of internal and external stakeholders. This role in particular requires the ability to credibly partner with engineering program leads on system design tradeoffs — strong, pragmatic opinions about what "ready" means for a specific quantum system, target customer, and market moment are necessary for success.

If you're passionate about emerging technologies, energized by working at the boundary between research and productized delivery, and excited about the opportunity to make a significant impact on the trajectory of IonQ and the quantum computing industry at large, we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Understand The Market: work internally and externally to build and communicate a strong point of view about our customers — particularly future customers who believe upcoming generations will unlock needed capability — and the ability for IonQ's and competitors' solutions to deliver on their needs.
• Understand our Technology: immerse yourself in IonQ's hardware roadmap, system software, experimental capabilities, and R&D pipeline. Build deep working relationships with the engineering program leads for your area, and understand the challenges and considerations that inform key design decisions and our ability to deliver for customers.
• Define and Align: build strong relationships with engineering to ensure advancements in capability are clearly aligned to business and customer outcomes, drive milestone alignment and clarity across in-flight hardware generations so capability demonstrations are coordinated events, not technical milestones the rest of the company catches up to later. Collaborate with delivery teams to manage tradeoffs and adjust as we learn.
• Deliver: Lead cross-functional efforts to land each new hardware generation across relevant markets and motions (Internal, Cloud, On-Prem). Define product value proposition, positioning, and go-to-market strategy, and contribute to its realization across Sales, Product Marketing, Customer Success, and more.
• Learn and Iterate: work closely with customers, customer success, applications research, internal data, and our own scientists to understand the success, health, and quality of products in development and in-market — and feed this understanding forward into the next generation's design.

You'd be a good fit with

• Bachelor's degree in Physics, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, a related engineering field, or equivalent real-world experience
• 8+ years of experience in technical product management or equivalent roles, with exposure to hardware-software co-development or scientific instrumentation
• Direct experience with Quantum Computing, Quantum Information Science, and/or AMO Physics — sufficient to credibly partner with engineering program leads on system design tradeoffs and key functional and non-functional requirements.
• Experience working on products that required building a new market for a technology and/or commercializing a technology for the first time
• World-class written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to articulate complex topics to technical and non-technical audiences
• A demonstrated ability to act as a self-starting leader in ambiguous and challenging environments, driving impact through persistence and adaptability

You'd be a great fit with

• An advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Physics, Quantum Information Science, Chemistry, Applied Mathematics, or related engineering field
• Publications in QIS, AMO physics, or adjacent fields; established relationships in the quantum computing research community
• Experience turning research-grade technologies into productized customer-facing offerings — particularly in domains where the customer cares about underlying capability, not just pricing and packaging
• Experience in Scientific Computing or High Performance Computing — their tools, users, business models, and operational challenges

Location: This role is based at our Bothell, WA office, with the option to work a few days a week remotely.
Travel: As needed
Job ID: 1692
The approximate base salary range for this position is $170,304 - $198,688. The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.