Customer Program Manager
Location: Pleasanton, CA (hybrid, in-person at our Pleasanton office) Reports to: Manager, Customer Programs & Field Engineering Type: Full-time Compensation: $130,000–$160,000 base, plus Bonus & RSUs
About the Role
AEye is looking for a Customer Program Manager to help own the customer lifecycle, from contract through delivery, across our product lines. You will manage a portfolio that includes roadmap-driven customers, who buy and build on our existing sensor platforms, and contract-driven programs for space and government customers, where committed milestones, a controlled requirements baseline, and formal change control shape the work. You will be the customer’s day-to-day program lead and the internal owner of commitments, turning what customers need and what contracts require into plans that our teams can execute. This role sits at the intersection of Customer Programs, Field Engineering, Engineering, Operations, Legal, and Finance.
Key Responsibilities
Customer Program Ownership
- Serve as the day-to-day program lead for assigned customers, from contract execution through delivery and handoff to support.
- Maintain each customer’s commitment baseline (requirements, scope, milestones, deliverables, and assumptions) and run change control for anything that adds scope, cost, or schedule risk.
- Own the customer-facing schedule: set expectations on dates, status, and risks, and run regular customer reviews and milestone review materials.
- Work with Field Application Engineers and Engineering to triage customer issues and escalations and drive them to resolution.
- Translate customer needs into clear, prioritized demand for engineering planning, in partnership with the Technical Program Manager.
- Contract-Driven Programs (Space and Government)
- Manage programs with formal milestone reviews, contractual deliverables, and milestone-based payments, and track progress against contract obligations.
- Support requirements traceability and interface documentation on contract-driven programs, in partnership with systems engineering.
- Coordinate flowdown of contract requirements to internal teams and suppliers, working with Legal and Quality & Compliance.
- Support customer insight requests, compliance reporting, and data-handling and export-control requirements.
Partner and Supplier Coordination
- Coordinate third-party partners, vendors, and subcontractors that support customer programs, including scope, quotes, agreements, deliverables, and schedule.
- Track partner commitments, quote expirations, purchase orders, and invoices, and raise slips early.
- Work with Operations to align build, assembly, test, and shipment plans with customer commitments.
Business and Financial Coordination
- Partner with Finance on program budgets, cost tracking, forecasts, and milestone billing, and support timekeeping and cost-reporting processes.
- Work with Legal on contract terms, amendments, NDAs, and export-control obligations.
Process and Cross-functional
- Help define, document, and maintain the customer lifecycle process, including handoffs between Sales/BD, Customer Programs, Engineering, and Operations.
- Report status, risks, and decisions needed in recurring cross-program reviews.
- Maintain program documentation: status reports, risk and issue logs, and decision records.
Required Qualifications
- 4+ years of program or project management experience in a hardware, technology, or engineering-driven environment.
- Experience communicating directly with customers or external stakeholders, including setting expectations, reporting status, and handling escalations.
- Ability to manage schedule, scope, risk, and change across multiple concurrent programs.
- Comfortable working day to day with engineers and the technical details of hardware or sensor products. You do not need to be an engineer, but you need to ask good questions and understand the answers.
- Strong written communication and documentation skills, and experience with tools such as Jira and Confluence or similar.
- Experience coordinating across functions such as Engineering, Operations, Finance, and Legal or Contracts.
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, business, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to work on-site at our Pleasanton, CA facility on a hybrid schedule.
Preferred Qualifications
- Government contracting experience, including milestone-based contracts and prime-to-sub flowdown, with a bonus for space flight hardware programs or builds.
- Experience taking programs through formal milestone reviews (such as PDR or CDR) and qualification campaigns.
- Exposure to compliance environments such as AS9100/ISO 9001, export control (ITAR/EAR), or controlled information handling.
- Partner or supplier oversight experience, including statements of work, quotes, and delivery tracking.
- Experience in government, smart infrastructure, or intelligent transportation markets.
- Familiarity with requirements management, traceability, or interface control documentation.
- Experience in LiDAR, sensors, robotics, automotive, or other hardware product environments, and the ability to flex between product-driven and contract-driven work.