Senior Director, Head of Data

Location: This position can work onsite or hybrid from one of our offices in the US or fully remote.
Travel: Up to 5%, domestic. 
Job ID: 1670

The Role

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.

Responsibilities

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)

The approximate base salary range for this position is $192,979 - $252,659. The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.