Crustdata for Talent Acquisition at IonQ127 open roles · 20 locations

The quantum talent pool is small. Know all of it.

IonQ has 127 roles open across 20 locations in 7 countries, and some of them draw on a pool of a few dozen people worldwide. Crustdata maps that pool from public professional data: who has done the work, where they sit today, and who just moved. Everything below was pulled against IonQ's own job board on Oct 27: 2,082 profiles that describe trapped-ion work, 433 PhD students and postdocs in those labs, and 109 people who left a quantum peer since May.

See the five plays ↓ Why IonQ is two hiring problems
Live Crustdata pulls · Oct 27, 2026 · titles shown, names withheld
127
open roles on IonQ's job board today, across 20 locations
2,082
profiles worldwide that describe trapped-ion work, 100 of them at IonQ
109
people who left a quantum peer since May 1 and started somewhere new
1,377
alumni of IonQ and the ten companies it has bought, now working elsewhere
What we see from the outside

Four things IonQ's recruiting is up against right now.

Read from IonQ's public job board and our index on Oct 27, 2026. Nothing here comes from inside IonQ.

83

Pools you can count by hand

That's how many trapped-ion profiles sit in Colorado outside IonQ, for a Boulder role that has been open since March. A job post won't fill it. A list of names will.

20

Locations, each its own market

24 open roles in Oxford, 20 in College Park, 17 in Bothell, 14 in Geneva, 11 in Louisville. Every site competes with different employers for the same skills.

10

Acquisitions to absorb

From ID Quantique in Geneva to SkyWater's foundry, each deal brought a team, a network and its own alumni. That's hiring capacity most recruiters never tap.

12

Of 109 quantum movers went to big tech

People leaving quantum peers since May went to Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and IBM as well as to other quantum companies. The competition for this talent is wider than the quantum field.

The big idea

IonQ hires like two companies at once.

32 of the 127 open roles call for quantum, photonics or cryptography depth. The other 95 compete with the whole tech market.

The first group is a list you can count: physicists, QPU designers, cryogenic and SNSPD engineers, post-quantum cryptographers. Nobody applies to those in volume, so the job is knowing every name and noticing when they move.

The second group is software, security, space hardware, manufacturing and federal sales. Those pools are big and crowded, so the job is filtering hard and reaching people first. The same data does both.

32 roles

Know them by name

Map the whole pool, watch it weekly, find the warm path in.

95 roles

Find them fast

Filter on the must-haves, rank with reasons, reach out the same day.

IonQ's open roles, one square each
32 quantum, photonics or cryptography depth95 software, security, hardware, manufacturing, GTM, G&A
Split by job title · IonQ's public job board · Oct 27, 2026
What we'd run for IonQ

Five ways to use it, built on IonQ's own reqs.

Ordered by how fast a recruiter could start. Play 01 works on any open role this week. Every table shows companies and titles only; the names come back in the pull.

01

Size every hard req before the first outreach

Run it this weekSix live IonQ reqs

Six roles from IonQ's board, sized on Oct 27. The Boulder ion transport physicist draws on 83 trapped-ion profiles in all of Colorado. The Geneva cryptography role has 80 post-quantum specialists in Switzerland. The federal AE role has 311 sellers who name the NRO, the combatant commands or Space Force around DC and Colorado. A hiring manager sees the real size of the market on day one.

How it runs
  1. Paste the posting into Claude. It turns the must-haves into filters: skills, past titles, employers, degree and location. person_search
  2. Count the pool near the site and worldwide, split by employer and seniority, so the hiring manager can trade location against depth. person_search · count
  3. Rank the closest fits with a reason for each, then pull work emails only for the ones worth a note. person_contact_enrich

"It's a tough market" isn't a plan. "A few dozen people worldwide name ion transport, and here they are" is.

→ Claude or the recruiter's sheetPer reqWhen a req opens
IonQ reqs, sizedOct 27, 2026
Req · siteNear siteWorld
Physicist, Ion Transport and Waveform DesignBoulder · in Colorado831,982
Staff Cryptography EngineerGeneva · in Switzerland804,462
Senior QPU Design EngineerOxford · in the UK71954
Senior Cryogenic EngineerGeneva · in Switzerland1383,265
Account Executive, NRO and Combatant CommandsCollege Park · DC area and Colorado311897
Principal Photonic Device Design EngineerSanta Barbara · in California6232,545
Profiles outside IonQ whose titles, skills or role descriptions match each req's core terms. A calibration pass with the hiring manager narrows each one.
02

Know the whole quantum bench, and who just moved

Watch it weekly

19 quantum hardware and software companies hold 4,752 profiles in our index, from Quantinuum's 660 to AQT's 29. Since May 1, 109 people left one of them and started somewhere new: 18 from Quantinuum, 16 from PsiQuantum, 10 from IQM. Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and IBM hired 12 of them, so the bench IonQ watches has to include where people go, not just where they come from.

How it runs
  1. List the companies IonQ competes with for talent, and count their people by function and seniority. person_search
  2. Set a watch on anyone who leaves one of them, with their new title and employer. watch_discovery_create
  3. Every Monday the moves arrive in a TA Slack channel, flagged when the person has trapped-ion, photonics or cryogenics depth.

People are most open to a conversation right around a change. A weekly feed means IonQ hears about it in days.

→ TA Slack channelWeeklySomeone leaves a peer
The quantum bench · 10 of 19Oct 27, 2026
CompanyProfilesLeft since May
Quantinuum66018
PsiQuantum61216
D-Wave4184
IQM Quantum Computers40110
Xanadu3326
Quantum Machines2876
Pasqal2846
Infleqtion2169
Photonic Inc.1876
Riverlane1527
Profiles in our index, not company headcount. "Left" means their time there ended on or after May 1 and a new role started elsewhere. The company list is IonQ's to set.
03

Meet the next PhD class before it graduates

Campus and early career

433 PhD students and postdocs describe trapped-ion work on their profiles, 208 of them in the US, and 57 list a PhD finish in 2026 or 2027. The biggest groups sit at Duke, Oxford, Innsbruck, UCLA and ETH Zürich, plus 8 at the University of Washington, a short drive from Bothell. IonQ's Senior Quantum Physicist posting already says it's open to people moving straight from a PhD.

How it runs
  1. Find students and postdocs by lab, field and expected finish year. person_search · education
  2. Add papers, citations and co-authors where a profile links Google Scholar. research_profiles
  3. Build a list per lab for internships, campus visits and early outreach, and re-run it each term.

Talking to a PhD a year before the defense beats competing for them the week after.

→ Campus and intern planEach termExpected PhD finish
Trapped-ion PhDs and postdocs, by labOct 27, 2026
Lab or institutionPhDs + postdocs
Duke UniversityDurham, North Carolina20
University of OxfordOxford, UK · near IonQ Oxford14
Universität InnsbruckInnsbruck, Austria14
UCLALos Angeles, California13
ETH ZürichZürich, Switzerland12
Leibniz Universität HannoverHannover, Germany9
University of WashingtonSeattle · near IonQ Bothell8
Stanford UniversityStanford, California8
NISTBoulder · near IonQ Boulder7
Counted from current titles (PhD, doctoral, graduate research, postdoc). Some students list their lab under a department name, so a few labs read low.
04

Ten acquisitions, ten alumni networks

Only IonQ can run this one

Since 2023 IonQ has announced ten acquisitions, from ID Quantique in Geneva to SkyWater in Minnesota. 1,115 people once worked at one of those companies and now work somewhere else, and 262 more are IonQ alumni, 89 of whom left in the last year. They already know the technology, the sites and some of the teams. Today they work at places like Honeywell, Planet, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and GlobalFoundries.

How it runs
  1. Pull everyone who worked at IonQ or a company it bought and works elsewhere now. person_search · past employer
  2. Split them by function, seniority and location, and match them to open reqs at the nearest site.
  3. Watch them for their next job change, the natural moment to talk about coming back. watch_create

No other company has these 1,377 people in its history. Boomerangs ramp faster, and they know who else was great.

→ Recruiters' boomerang listEvery monthAn alum changes jobs
Alumni now working elsewhereOct 27, 2026
Company · announcedAlumni
SkyWater TechnologyFoundry · 2026443
Capella SpaceSpace · 2025307
IonQ itself89 left in the last 12 months262
ID QuantiqueQuantum security · 2025185
SkyloomOptical communications · 202567
Seed InnovationsSoftware and ML · 202643
Oxford IonicsTrapped-ion hardware · 202530
QubitekkQuantum networking · 202428
Vector Atomic, Lightsynq, Entangled Networks19
A few people worked at two of these, so the rows add up to slightly more than 1,377.
05

Jennifer's bench, pointed at IonQ's open roles

Built from Jennifer's own career

14,526 people worked at Twilio, Wiz, Illumio or Okta in the same years Jennifer did. Today 313 of them hold security titles, 282 run customer success, 106 work in SRE or DevOps, and 23 sell to federal or public-sector buyers. IonQ has open roles in each of those lanes. Another 150 are recruiters, sourcers or TA leaders, for when the team grows.

How it runs
  1. Match Jennifer's employers and years against everyone in our index. person_search · employer + dates
  2. Keep the people whose current title fits an open IonQ req, and sort by how long the overlap ran.
  3. Jennifer or the recruiter picks who to message first. A shared employer is a reason to reach out, not proof two people know each other.

"We were both at Wiz in 2023" is the easiest opener there is.

→ Jennifer's shortlistOnce, then per reqA req opens in one of these lanes
Same company, same years as JenniferOct 27, 2026
Their lane todayPeople
Security and cryptographyIonQ is hiring: Principal Cybersecurity Architect, Senior Staff AI Security Lead313
Customer successIonQ is hiring: Senior Manager, Global Customer Success282
Recruiting and TAFor the TA team itself, as it grows150
SRE, DevOps and platformIonQ is hiring: Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Staff DevOps Engineer106
Federal and public-sector salesIonQ is hiring: Senior AE, Intel and FedCiv; Senior AE, NW SLED23
Overlap means the same employer in overlapping years: 11,767 at Twilio, 1,193 at Illumio, 999 at Wiz, 607 at Okta.
Beyond the five

Four more once the first five are running.

Competing reqs

See who else is hiring the same people

Track open roles at the 19 quantum peers by title, so recruiters know when Quantinuum or PsiQuantum opens the same physicist req IonQ has.

job_search · company · job_details.title · date posted
Federal roles

Self-reported clearances for College Park and Albuquerque

Filter AE, field engineer and program roles on profile text that mentions an active clearance, then confirm in the first call.

person_search · headline · role descriptions · location
Depth, not titles

Papers and code next to the profile

Publication counts and co-authors for scientists, public repos and languages for software engineers, so the shortlist shows the work.

research_profiles · dev_platform_profiles
Site planning

A talent read before a team is placed

Count a role family near Oxford, Geneva, Bothell or Louisville before deciding where a new team sits, and see which employers hold that talent today.

person_search · location · current employer · count
Straight answers

What TA leaders usually ask first.

Q1Where does the data come from?

Public professional profiles, company pages, job postings and the open web, across 1B+ people and 60M+ companies. When freshness matters, a search can run live instead of against the index.

We don't log into anyone's accounts, and we never see applicants or anything inside Greenhouse.

Q2Does it replace Greenhouse or a sourcing tool?

No. Greenhouse stays the system of record. Crustdata is the data underneath: recruiters ask in Claude, watches post to a Slack channel, or an engineer calls the API. The shortlist comes back as a list the team can work from.

Q3What about people who don't describe their work on their profile?

Text matches miss them, and every count on this page is a text match, so read them as floors. Employer, lab and school history fill much of the gap, because those stay filterable even when the profile text is thin.

Q4Can it show who actually knows whom?

Not directly. We don't read connection lists. The warm-path signal is shared history: the same employer, lab or school in overlapping years, which is how plays 04 and 05 work. Confirming the relationship is still a human step.

If it's useful

Start with the req that's been open longest.

No dates and no commitments. One real search is the fastest way to judge it.

The short version

The quantum bench is a few thousand people. Keep every one of them in view.

And use the same data to fill the other 95 roles faster.