other
Posted Jun 12Senior Technical Program Manager
at brightwheel
United StatesHybrid
Requirements
- WHO YOU ARE You are an AI-native Senior Technical Program Manager who combines deep systems-level engineering judgment, strong product sense, and exceptional execution to drive our hardest, most technically complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives.
- You lead by example in how modern, automated execution gets done, ensuring our AI-driven capabilities are safe, scalable, and delivered with incredible velocity.
- You use AI assistants, agents, and modern tooling in your own daily workflows to automate tracking, write code scripts, build prototypes, and show what great execution looks like.
- We are using AI to turn brightwheel from a system of record into a system of action, reducing toil, automating routine work, improving decision-making, and accelerating how we build.
- you will: - Drive high-stakes, multi-stakeholder technical programs that embed AI capabilities across our entire product surface area—ensuring tight synchronization between data, platform, and frontend product teams.
- - Partner with engineering leadership to design and operate an AI hybrid workforce, establishing the necessary guardrails, evaluation frameworks, governance, and observability required for autonomous agents.
- - Streamline internal engineering velocity by implementing AI-powered tooling, automated testing pipelines, and agentic workflows that catch issues early and minimize operational overhead.
- - Apply an AI-native programmatic approach to optimizing internal functions like customer support and onboarding, ensuring cross-functional alignment as we scale.
- What You’ve Done We are open to a variety of backgrounds, but qualified candidates usually bring: - A strong computer science foundation: You have a 4-year computer science degree or equivalent depth in core CS topics, giving you the technical grounding to reason well across distributed systems, machine learning abstractions, and data architecture.
- - A record of orchestrating complex systems at scale: You have a proven track record of landing highly technical, multi-team programs from inception to production deployment.
- You understand what it takes to make deeply integrated products succeed in live production environments. - Applied AI familiarity in production: You have driven programs involving AI, LLM orchestration, or automated data pipelines.
- experience driving alignment across senior engineers, product directors, and executive stakeholders without having direct reporting lines over them.
- What Sets You Apart The candidates who will thrive in this role go beyond the standard program management tracking toolkit: - Product taste and technical intuition: You operate without needing a product manager crutch.
- You use your deep technical knowledge to bridge the gap between architectural constraints and consumer value, ensuring we build the right things the right way. - A "T-Shaped" builder mindset: You are deeply expert in program execution and system architecture, but capable of diving just-in-time into data engineering, cloud infrastructure, or frontend flows.
- You use AI to multiply your learning speed, allowing you to confidently review code or write scripts to validate integration paths. - Fearless handling of ambiguity: You run toward the company's messiest, least-defined technical friction points.
- You create structure, define clear milestones, and build high-fidelity alignment where none existed. - Hands-on fluency with AI-native development: You don't just write documentation; you use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, v0) to automate your own technical tracking, build internal tooling dashboards, or construct technical proof-of-concepts to unblock engineering discussions.
- Technology We work with: - AI & Automation: Frontier models, vector databases, orchestration and agent frameworks, and modern AI coding tools like Claude Code / Cursor.
- - Backend & Data: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS, Redis, event and analytics pipelines.
- - Frontend & Mobile: React with TypeScript, Native iOS (Swift), and Android (Kotlin with Jetpack Compose).
- - Cloud & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, GitHub Actions, FluxCD, and core AWS services (S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS).
Benefits
- Our Mission and Opportunity Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology.
- You will orchestrate the technical execution of this vision.
Contact
- We are a three-time Cloud 100 company https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.
- We embody our Leadership Principles https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ in our work and culture.
- All legitimate communications come from @mybrightwheel.com http://mybrightwheel.com addresses, and we never ask for payment or sensitive personal data as part of our hiring process.
- If you suspect fraudulent contact, reach out to security@mybrightwheel.com.
Additional details
- Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day.
- Our Team Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused.
- We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.
- You act as the technical glue in ambiguous spaces, transforming company-wide priorities into high-velocity delivery across multiple engineering pods, product lines, and operations teams.
- You will succeed in this role if you are: - Focused on execution and business impact: You care about scaling brightwheel’s value and impact by orders of magnitude.
- You don't just manage timelines; you ruthlessly unblock technical dependencies and manage systemic risks to deliver better outcomes for our users. - A practitioner-leader and builder: You do not coordinate from a distance.
- What You’ll Do Brightwheel already supports the workflows that keep early education businesses running: enrollment, billing, staffing, classroom operations, family communication, and compliance.
- You will manage the cross-functional delivery of our most complex initiatives, cutting across product engineering, infrastructure, data pipelines, and internal business systems. In this role,
- - Manage the complex execution dependencies of building software that recommends next steps, completes routine work, and automates meaningful parts of our customers’ operations.
- - Facilitate critical technical trade-offs, driving consensus on build-versus-buy decisions, architectural patterns, and platform leverage without losing momentum.