Senior Technical Program Manager, AI

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 https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, 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 https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ 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