Customer Program Manager

About the company

Eagle Wireless develops secure, dependable, and scalable cellular modules and connectivity solutions for automotive and IoT use cases. The company has a strong footprint in the United States and also operates global R&D teams across North America, Europe, and APAC. Its products are designed for long product life, regulatory alignment, and cyber-secure deployment, helping OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and IoT innovators launch connected solutions with confidence in a demanding global market.

Role overview

The Customer Program Manager serves as the customer’s main project contact across the full product lifecycle. This role is the external counterpart to the internal engineering project lead, ensuring the customer-facing schedule, commercial matters, quality topics, and production-related issues are managed clearly and consistently. The position requires a blend of relationship management, technical understanding, and commercial judgement.

Customer relationship management

• Act as the single primary contact for project-related customer communication, including engineering, commercial, quality, and production matters.
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with customer programme managers, purchasing teams, quality engineers, and logistics or production contacts.
• Represent Eagle Wireless professionally in meetings, milestone reviews, audits, and escalation forums.
• Address customer expectations proactively by raising risks early, suggesting practical solutions, and avoiding last-minute surprises.

Schedule coordination

• Own the customer-visible project plan and keep it aligned with the internal master schedule maintained by the engineering project lead.
• Run regular schedule alignment discussions between the customer and internal teams to close gaps and resolve conflicting milestones.
• Handle timing-related change requests by assessing impact internally, then communicating Eagle Wireless’s position, including delays, trade-offs, or alternatives, back to the customer.
• Monitor customer-side dependencies such as late inputs, lab access, or homologation approvals and escalate issues that may affect delivery timelines.

Commercial management

• Manage the project’s commercial interface by tracking budgets against purchase orders, monitoring cost movement, and coordinating pricing or contract updates with Sales.
• Lead engineering change request activities and related commercial claims so that every scope change is documented and priced correctly.
• Support Sales in negotiations around contracts and service-level agreements for active programmes.
• Track programme profitability indicators together with Finance and Sales.

Quality interface

• Own all customer-facing quality matters such as 8D reporting, initial sample submissions, customer audits, and field quality concerns.
• Work with the internal quality managers to ensure customer requirements are clearly understood and met within agreed timelines.
• Lead or support customer quality review meetings and present status updates, corrective actions, and improvement plans.
• Maintain customer scorecards and quality KPIs, and drive improvements where ratings need to be strengthened.

Production and series support

• Manage the customer interface during ramp-up and series production by coordinating delivery schedules, call-offs, and capacity confirmations with Production and Logistics.
• Resolve customer escalations linked to delivery performance, packaging, labelling, or logistics, and communicate outcomes clearly.
• Handle customer-facing aspects of engineering changes during serial production, including approval timing and impact communication.
• Support a smooth handover from development to series supply by ensuring customer-specific production and logistics requirements are captured and implemented.

Reporting and governance

• Prepare regular customer-facing project reports covering schedule, quality, open issues, and commercial progress.
• Maintain a communication record and action tracker so that commitments are followed through and closed on time.
• Share programme health and customer relationship updates with the Head of EPM and other relevant internal stakeholders.

Qualifications and experience

A bachelor’s degree or higher in Engineering, Business Administration, or a related discipline is required, and a mix of technical and commercial education is considered a plus. Project management certification such as PMP or IPMA is preferred. Training in Key Account Management or automotive sales/commercial topics is also an advantage. Candidates should bring at least 5 years of experience in a customer-facing project management or key account role within the automotive supply chain, with proven exposure to both technical and commercial subjects. Experience handling escalations, change requests, and quality issues in automotive series production is important. A practical understanding of automotive NAD, telematics, or embedded electronics development is needed to communicate credibly with customer engineering teams and translate technical constraints into schedule and commercial language. Knowledge of APQP, PPAP, IATF 16949, VDA 6.3, and OEM or customer-specific requirements is expected, along with familiarity with ECR/ECN processes, SOP/EOL planning, and series contract structures. Exposure to automotive logistics and production flows such as Kanban, call-off systems, JIT, and JIS will be helpful.

Skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication
• Negotiation and conflict handling
• Stakeholder relationship management
• Project planning and schedule coordination
• Commercial and contract awareness
• Automotive quality process knowledge
• Customer escalation management
• Cross-functional coordination
• Reporting and status tracking
• Working knowledge of ERP and project tools
• Fluency in English
• German language ability preferred
• Mandarin Chinese knowledge is an advantage

Benefits

• Competitive compensation with performance-linked bonuses
• Career growth and professional development opportunities
• Supportive team environment with strong leadership

Additional information

This is a full-time, onsite position based in Kronach, Bavaria, Germany. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.