[Hiring] Director, Global Customer Success @IonQ

Role Description

IonQ is hiring a Director, Global Customer Success to own the post-sale customer experience across its space portfolio including Capella Data as a Service (DaaS) and satellite systems, Skyloom optical communications terminals and crosslink solutions, and the broader space solutions offering. You will lead both customer success and technical support as a single global organization, accountable for onboarding, adoption, mission outcomes, renewals, and support performance for enterprise, defense, government, and international partner customers. This is a build-and-scale leadership role: you will define the operating model, stand up the support function and its SLAs, and grow a distributed team across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Lead the global customer success and technical support organization, including regional CS managers, technical account managers, and tier 1–3 support engineers.
• Own post-sale commercial outcomes: gross and net revenue retention, subscription and tasking-capacity renewals, expansion pipeline generated with sales, and churn reduction.
• Define and run the customer lifecycle — onboarding and first-mission time-to-value, adoption and usage monitoring, success planning, executive business reviews, and health scoring with clear escalation triggers.
• Stand up and operate the technical support function: tiered support model, follow-the-sun coverage, SLA and SLO definition, incident and outage response, root-cause analysis, and postmortem discipline.
• Partner with engineering, mission operations, and product to resolve escalations, drive problem management, and feed recurring customer issues and requirements into the roadmap.
• Support the channel and partner ecosystem: enable partner-delivered success and support, define what partners own versus IonQ, and maintain consistent service quality across indirect customers.
• Instrument the function with data — support ticket volumes and deflection, first-response and resolution times, CSAT/NPS, adoption and consumption metrics — and report performance to executive leadership.
• Build the team and the tooling: hire and develop global talent, select and operate CRM/CS and ticketing platforms, and create the knowledge base, documentation, and self-service resources that scale support.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in customer success, technical support, services, or post-sale leadership, including 5+ years leading global or multi-region teams in geospatial data, earth observation, satellite communications, satellite systems, defense technology, or enterprise data/SaaS.
• Demonstrated ownership of retention and renewal outcomes at scale, with a record of improving NRR, reducing churn, and driving measurable adoption of technical products.
• Experience building a technical support organization from an early stage — tiered models, SLA commitments, escalation paths, on-call and follow-the-sun coverage, and incident management.
• Experience serving U.S. government, defense, and intelligence customers alongside commercial and international accounts, including mission-critical delivery expectations and export-control constraints (ITAR/EAR).
• Ability to engage credibly with technical and mission stakeholders on remote sensing, SAR, optical communications and crosslinks, tasking, and data delivery workflows.
• Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, or a related field; willingness to travel up to 30%, including international travel.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience supporting SAR, optical imagery, or RF sensing data and analytics customers.
• Background in satellite systems, optical communications terminals, ground segment, or space mission operations.
• Experience scaling post-sale functions for an emerging technology or new category, including partner-delivered service models.
• Active U.S. security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.
• Familiarity with CS and support platforms (Gainsight, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Jira Service Management) and support automation or AI-assisted deflection.

Requirements

• The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.
• If this role has a commission structure, the compensation range below just reflects the base compensation range.
• Wage Transparency: $176,000 — $220,000 USD.
• Compensation will vary based on individual factors such as education, qualifications, and experience of the final candidate(s), specific office location, and calibration against relevant market data and internal team equity.
• Posted base salary figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Matching 401(k).
• Unlimited PTO and paid holidays.
• Parental/adoption leave.
• Legal insurance.
• Home technology stipend.