Brightwheel
Senior Technical Program Manager, AI
Docker
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
Edtech.com's Summary
Brightwheel is hiring a Senior Technical Program Manager, AI to lead and coordinate complex, multi-stakeholder AI-driven technical projects across engineering, product, and operations teams. The role focuses on driving execution of AI capabilities that automate workflows and improve decision-making in early education technology, ensuring safe, scalable, and high-velocity delivery.
Highlights
- Lead technical programs embedding AI across product surfaces, coordinating data, platform, and frontend teams.
- Manage dependencies and risks in developing AI software that automates customer operations.
- Partner with engineering leadership to design AI hybrid workforce with governance and observability frameworks.
- Implement AI-powered tooling and automated testing to enhance engineering velocity.
- Optimize internal functions like customer support and onboarding using AI-driven methods.
- Make critical trade-offs on architecture and build-versus-buy decisions.
- Require a computer science degree or equivalent knowledge in systems, machine learning, and data architecture.
- Experience delivering complex multi-team technical programs and applied AI in production environments.
- Proficient in influencing cross-functional senior stakeholders without direct authority.
- Technical skills include AI frontier models, orchestration frameworks, Ruby on Rails, React/TypeScript, AWS cloud services, Docker, and Kubernetes.
- Compensation ranges from $154K to $237K with equity offerings and comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, vision, paid parental leave, and flexible PTO.
Senior Technical Program Manager, AI Full Description
Senior Technical Program Manager, AI
United States
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Remote
Department
Engineering
Compensation
- $154K – $237K • Offers Equity
Compensation & Benefits
At brightwheel, we reward people who make things happen. Our compensation is benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies, with ranges set by function, level, and location. Final offers reflect experience and expertise, and your recruiter can walk you through the range for your region.
Equity & Ownership
Many roles include equity, giving you the chance to share in the long-term success you help create.
Benefits & Well-Being
We design our benefits to help you (and your family) live well, stay healthy, and keep growing. While specifics vary by region, we typically offer:
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Generous paid parental leave
- Flexible PTO so you can recharge when you need it
- Local retirement or savings plans (e.g., 401(k) in the U.S.)
We’re committed to pay equity and to building a diverse, inclusive workplace where everyone can do their best work and feel supported along the way.
Overview
Application
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. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.
Our Team
Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.
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 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 lead by example in how modern, automated execution gets done, ensuring our AI-driven capabilities are safe, scalable, and delivered with incredible velocity.
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. You are a hands-on technical force multiplier. 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.
What You’ll Do
Brightwheel already supports the workflows that keep early education businesses running: enrollment, billing, staffing, classroom operations, family communication, and compliance. The next step is bigger. 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 orchestrate the technical execution of this vision. 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, 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.
- Manage the complex execution dependencies of building software that recommends next steps, completes routine work, and automates meaningful parts of our customers’ operations.
- 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.
- Facilitate critical technical trade-offs, driving consensus on build-versus-buy decisions, architectural patterns, and platform leverage without losing momentum.
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. You understand the nuances of non-deterministic software, including evaluation, prompt engineering, latency bottlenecks, and safety boundaries.
- Influence without authority: You have extensive 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).
Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
Protecting Our Applicants: Please be aware of recruiting scams impersonating Brightwheel. All legitimate communications come from @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 [email protected]. Thank you for helping us keep our applicant community safe.
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