QPU Production Test Development Manager

Role:
We are seeking a QPU Production Test Development Manager to lead the engineers and technicians responsible for validating new QPU designs and verifying that manufactured QPUs meet agreed performance and acceptance criteria. You will own the test strategy, laboratory capability, and execution of test campaigns, working across design, science, engineering, and manufacturing teams.

The role sits within Device Operations, alongside fabrication, packaging and quality. As IonQ works with foundry and packaging partners to scale QPU production, you will define what a good test looks like and what makes a certified QPU, then make sure our partners follow that recipe as test functions move to them along the product roadmap.

Responsibilities:
In this position, you will own the test roadmap, team priorities, laboratory readiness, and the quality of the data used to make QPU decisions. Working with QPU design, science, systems engineering, packaging, software, and manufacturing teams across multiple sites, you will turn requirements into repeatable test plans and clear acceptance criteria. This is a technical leadership role for someone who can guide complex hardware investigations while developing engineers and improving test throughput.

QPUs are scarce, so much of the work is finding upstream methods that let a device pass a gate into the next test level. Done well, this builds a yield and quality picture that predicts final performance long before a QPU reaches the end of the line. You will build a team of around four people in your first year and work closely with the design team in Oxford and our fabrication partners in Minnesota.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of test engineers and technicians, setting priorities, providing technical guidance, and building effective test laboratory practices.
• Own QPU test strategy from design validation through manufacturing verification, at both die and package level, including coverage, procedures, common pass/fail criteria, and a standard test report format used consistently across sites and test stations.
• Plan and coordinate parallel test campaigns across labs at multiple sites, balancing QPU availability, laboratory capacity, equipment budget, vendor lead times, and program milestones.
• Establish reliable test infrastructure and automated workflows, oversee equipment qualification, calibration, and maintenance, and track measures of coverage, repeatability, cycle time, data quality, and traceability.
• Lead the response to ambiguous results and QPU failures through structured root cause analysis with design, science, packaging, fabrication, and external partners, and present results, risks, and recommendations that support design changes, QPU selection, and release decisions.

Requirements:
You will have a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, physics, applied physics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, and significant experience testing complex hardware or experimental systems. You will have owned test plans, measurement methods, and technical results, and you bring strong experimental troubleshooting skills with a sound understanding of measurement uncertainty, repeatability, and data analysis.

You will have led engineers or technical laboratory teams, both as a people manager and as the technical lead of cross-functional test programs, prioritizing work across multiple test activities. Experience developing or overseeing test automation, preferably using Python, is important, as is the ability to work across hardware, software, science, and manufacturing disciplines and communicate technical conclusions clearly.

You’d be a great fit with:

• Experience testing or operating trapped ion systems, quantum hardware, precision optical systems, or other complex physics based instruments.
• Experience with optics and lasers, vacuum systems, cryogenic systems, electronics, control systems, or device packaging.
• Electrical test and characterization of devices at both die and package level, including at cryogenic temperatures.
• Experience building test capability for new product introduction and transferring methods into a repeatable manufacturing workflow.
• Experience working in a startup or scale up environment.

Salary:

$160,000-$240,000