Senior Director of Head of Data

Who you are

• We are hiring a Chief Data Officer

What the job involves

• IonQ is scaling rapidly across geographies, functions, and acquisitions. As a result, data is increasingly fragmented across systems, teams, and entities. We are hiring a Chief Data Officer to establish the IT-enabled data foundation, architecture, integration patterns, cataloging, and governance workflows needed to make data cohesive, trusted, secure, and usable across existing functional data domains
• This role operates horizontally across the organization, partnering with Finance, GTM, HR, IT, Architecture, Security, and Product teams to ensure data is consistent, secure, and usable—without displacing functional ownership
• Functions remain accountable for the business meaning, quality, rules, and use of their data; this role provides the enterprise data architecture, methodology, tooling, and integration support to make that data usable across IonQ
• Enterprise Data Alignment, Source-of-Truth Mapping & Product Integration
• Design and drive a common enterprise data framework that connects product, business-system, and functional data domains while preserving functional ownership of domain data
• Establish shared data models, taxonomies, and definition-management processes across core domains (Finance, GTM, People, Operations, R&D), with functional owners accountable for domain-specific business definitions
• Maintain an enterprise registry of authoritative data sources, key data owners, major data flows, dependencies, and downstream reporting / analytics uses
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to ensure data structures support productization and scalability
• Data Governance Enablement, Policy Workflow & Quality
• Define and implement data governance operating models that clarify ownership, stewardship, decision rights, escalation paths, and accountability across functions, IT, Security, and Legal / Compliance
• Establish standards for data quality controls, lineage, auditability, and cross-system data integrity, while functional owners remain accountable for the accuracy and business quality of their source data
• Partner with functional data owners, Legal / Compliance, Security, IT, and Architecture to develop and operationalize data policies, governance workflows, and control requirements
• Ensure data is trusted, explainable, and decision-ready across the organization
• Data Access, Security & Compliance
• Design and implement data access models, including:
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
• Establish access-request, approval, provisioning, and audit workflows, with functional data owners retaining approval authority for access to their domain data
• Ensure alignment with enterprise identity and access management (IAM) systems
• Partner closely with Security (CISO) Legal / Compliance, and functional data owners to translate requirements into practical data-access, tagging, handling, and control workflows for:
• ITAR, export controls, CUI, PII, financial data, and other regulatory requirements
• Enable secure, appropriate, and auditable data availability across stakeholders, consistent with agreed business, legal, and security rules
• Data Strategy & Infrastructure Alignment
• Develop and maintain the enterprise data-platform roadmap, aligned to existing and future environments, including:
• Snowflake environments across business units
• Potential data lake, lakehouse, warehouse, semantic-layer, or hybrid architectures as needed
• Assess when to connect, consolidate, or defer data-platform buildout based on function-led system consolidation timelines, reporting needs, data quality, and integration complexity
• Partner with IT and Architecture to ensure data flows, pipelines, and integrations are scalable and consistent
• Document how data moves across systems, where it is sourced, which system is authoritative, what transformations occur, and where downstream reports or automated workflows depend on it
• Data Integration & M&A
• Lead the IT/data workstream for acquisitions and new entities, focused on data-source mapping, integration patterns, lineage, access, quality controls, and reporting readiness
• Develop scalable approaches to onboard, normalize, and harmonize new data environments in partnership with functional system owners and integration teams
• Create mechanisms to reconcile and document differences in data definitions and structures across entities, with functional owners approving domain-specific definitions
• Intellectual Property & Critical Data Assets
• Establish the methodology, tooling, and workflows to identify, classify, tag, and manage critical data and IP across the enterprise, in partnership with Legal, Security, technical stakeholders, and functional data owners
• Partner with Security, Legal, and technical stakeholders to ensure:
• Appropriate controls and protections are in place defined, implemented, and monitored through the right combination of IT/Data, Security, Legal / Compliance, and functional-owner responsibilities
• Data remains usable while protected
• Enable project- or program-level data handling rules where appropriate, so sensitive technical, product, or program data can be protected without requiring every end user to make legal or export-control determinations
• Support development of a long-term strategy for safeguarding high-value data assets
• What You Won’t Own (by design)
• To maintain clarity and avoid duplication:
• Analytics, KPIs, and business reporting ownership (Finance / Business Analytics); this role owns the governed data foundation, lineage, and source-of-truth mapping that enable trusted reporting
• AI strategy and business use cases (AI leadership/ business owners); this role supports the data access, governance, integration, and deployment-control pathways for AI/ML capabilities that use enterprise data
• Enterprise applications and core infrastructure ownership (CIO / IT application and infrastructure owners); this role owns or co-owns data-platform strategy, data integration patterns, metadata, lineage, and cataloging within the IT operating model
• Non-data enterprise architecture and business-system design (Architecture/ system owners); this role owns enterprise data architecture, data-flow standards, and integration-design guidance
• Cybersecurity strategy, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and security-control validation (CISO); this role partners with Security to implement data-aware controls, tagging, access workflows, and evidence trails
• Domain-level data ownership, including business meaning, source-system data quality, business rules, and functional usage decisions (remains within functions)
• Operating Model
• Acts as a horizontal leader and integrator, not a vertical owner
• Serves as a consultative data architecture and integrity reviewer on function-led initiatives, not the default approval gate or replacement for the functional system owner
• Drives alignment through influence, standards, and governance—not control
• Holds decision rights over IT-owned data architecture, data-platform roadmap, integration standards, cataloging, metadata, lineage, and data-governance workflows; functional owners retain decision rights over domain definitions and business rules
• Works closely with:
• Finance / Analytics (data inputs to reporting)
• GTM (CRM and pipeline data consistency)
• HR (people data via HRIS transformation)
• IT / Architecture (systems and data flows)
• Security (compliance and protection)
• Product / Engineering (product-aligned data structures)