Engineering Operations Manager

Engineering Operations Manager: QuEra is seeking an Engineering Operations Manager to make execution across software, hardware, test infrastructure, and QPU programs more predictable, visible, and efficient. This person will facilitate the operating system around engineering: planning cadence, cross-team dependency visibility, Jira and Confluence hygiene, release and integration coordination, operational metrics, and follow-through on decisions and action items. The role is designed to give engineering leaders and senior technical staff more time for architecture, technical decisions, team development, and delivery. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with broad organizational influence. It is not a substitute for technical ownership, product management, engineering management, or infrastructure ownership. Engineering and functional leaders remain accountable for priorities, staffing and resource allocation, architecture, technical acceptance criteria, technical risk acceptance, and release or machine go/no-go decisions. The successful candidate will create the structure that lets those functions work together effectively. What you will own: • Facilitate engineering planning and execution • Run a consistent planning and review cadence across software, hardware, QPU programs, and test and engineering infrastructure. • Translate company and program priorities set by the appropriate leaders into a coherent, capacity-aware engineering plan with named owners, milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria supplied or approved by technical owners. • Maintain a single, decision-useful view of active initiatives, planned work, critical-path dependencies, risks, and delivery confidence. • Facilitate weekly execution reviews, periodic roadmap reviews, release-readiness reviews, and milestone retrospectives. • Surface priority or resource conflicts early, document their delivery impact, and bring them to the accountable leader for decision. • Track decisions and actions to closure without becoming the priority setter, resource owner, or technical approver. • Assist with Jira, Confluence, and GitHub operating discipline • Establish and maintain, in partnership with engineering leaders, practical standards for initiative, epic, issue, and release hygiene across engineering Jira projects. • Work with technical owners to ensure active work has a clear owner, current status, leadership-approved priority and target, dependency context, and definition of done. • Keep Jira roadmaps, Confluence status pages, engineering documentation, and GitHub delivery activity aligned enough to support reliable reporting. • Facilitate regular backlog and work-in-progress reviews so accountable leaders can disposition stale, duplicate, unowned, or poorly scoped work. • Improve traceability from requirements and engineering decisions through implementation, validation, release, and operational follow-up. • Automate recurring status collection and reporting where practical, while preserving clear human ownership of priorities and decisions. Cross-functional dependency and milestone management: • Coordinate dependency visibility among software, hardware, systems, science, test infrastructure, lab operations, procurement, facilities, security, and external partners. • Build integrated plans for machine milestones, hardware/software integration gates, testbed readiness, infrastructure transitions, and customer or partner commitments using estimates and technical inputs approved by accountable owners. • Track long-lead procurement, vendor, lab, compute, network, storage, test-equipment, and staffing dependencies that can affect engineering delivery. • Prepare decision briefs when scope, schedule, capacity, or technical dependencies require leadership tradeoffs. • Maintain risk, assumption, issue, and dependency logs for critical programs and ensure mitigations have accountable owners and target dates. • Escalate unresolved conflicts without independently committing another team's resources, changing technical scope, or accepting technical risk. Facilitate release, quality, and operational readiness: • Coordinate release and deployment readiness across repositories, CI/CD pipelines, test environments, hardware configurations, and target machines. • Facilitate the development and use of lightweight readiness gates covering code, hardware, test evidence, documentation, rollback or recovery plans, observability, and operational ownership; technical owners define and approve the criteria and make go/no-go recommendations. • Partner with engineering owners to improve build, test, release, and deployment flow without taking ownership of the underlying technical systems. • Coordinate post-incident follow-up, ensuring significant failures produce clear corrective actions, owners, due dates, and updates to engineering plans; the responsible engineering or infrastructure owner leads incident response, diagnosis, and root-cause approval. • Track operational and quality signals such as aging work, escaped defects, reopened issues, cycle time, blocked work, release predictability, and action-item closure. Encourage engineering communications and continuous improvement: • Produce concise, trustworthy weekly and monthly engineering updates for technical and company leadership. • Create meeting agendas, pre-reads, decision records, and action logs that reduce meeting time and ambiguity. • Improve shared onboarding processes and make engineering processes, ownership, and authoritative sources easier to find, while functional leaders retain ownership of role-specific onboarding and technical training. • Identify recurring coordination work that should be standardized, automated, delegated, or eliminated. • Help pilot and operationalize QuEra's unified hardware/software engineering process, including synchronized planning and integration gates approved by engineering leadership. Decision-rights summary: • The Engineering Operations Manager owns the engineering operating cadence, integrated plan, dependency and risk visibility, reporting, readiness coordination, and action follow-through. • Engineering, Product, Science, Hardware, Software, and Test & Engineering Infrastructure leaders retain ownership of strategy and priorities, architecture and design, people management, staffing and resource allocation, technical estimates and acceptance criteria, underlying build/release/deployment systems, incident command and root-cause conclusions, and final technical go/no-go decisions. We consistently monitor external market data and update base salary ranges accordingly. We determine base compensation decisions on several factors, including as geographic placement, role-specific knowledge, skills, and/or experience. In addition to our base salary offerings, we also provide equity grants for all new hires. $180,000-$250,000. Note: This role is located in Boston, MA and requires you to be on-site 5 days per week. QuEra is committed to cultivating a diverse work environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We highly value diversity in our current and future employees and do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.