Automotive Customer Program Manager

Eagle Wireless is a connectivity company delivering secure, reliable, and scalable cellular modules and solutions for automotive and IoT applications. With a strong presence in the United States and global R&D teams across North America, Europe, and APAC, Eagle Wireless supports customers worldwide with long-life, compliant, and cyber-secure connectivity products. Focused on trust, supply chain resilience, and regulatory compliance, Eagle Wireless helps OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and IoT innovators deploy connected technologies with confidence in an increasingly complex global environment.

We are looking for: Customer Program Manager

Customer Project Manager (CPM) is EagleWireless’s single point of contact — the one face to the customer — for all project-related topics throughout the product lifecycle. While the Engineering Project Lead (EPL) drives internal development execution, the CPM owns the external customer relationship: aligning schedules and milestones between the customer and EagleWireless’s internal EPM, and handling all commercial, quality, and production topics in direct dialogue with the customer.

The CPM bridges the boundary between EagleWireless and its tier-1 / OEM customers, translating customer expectations into internal action and representing EagleWireless’s position clearly and professionally toward the outside. The role requires equal strength in relationship management, commercial acumen, and technical understanding.

Main responsibilities:

Customer Relationship Management — One Face to the Customer

• Serve as the sole primary point of contact for all project-related customer communication, covering engineering, commercial, quality, and production topics.
• Build and maintain strong, trust-based relationships with customer programme managers, purchasing contacts, quality engineers, and logistics/production interfaces.
• Represent EagleWireless professionally in customer meetings, milestone reviews, audits, and escalation discussions.
• Manage customer expectations proactively — communicate issues early, propose solutions, and prevent surprises.

Schedule Alignment — Customer vs. Internal

• Own the external project schedule as seen by the customer; ensure it is consistent with EagleWireless’s internal master schedule managed by the EPL.
• Facilitate regular schedule sync meetings between customer and internal EPM; identify and resolve gaps, conflicts, or misalignments between customer milestone expectations and internal plan.
• Manage customer change requests affecting timing: assess internal impact together with the EPL and communicate the EagleWireless position — including delays, trade-offs, or counter-proposals — back to the customer.
• Track and report customer-side actions and dependencies (e.g. late customer inputs, lab access, homologation approvals) that affect the internal schedule; escalate accordingly.

Commercial Topics

• Manage the commercial project relationship: track project budgets against customer purchase orders, monitor cost changes, and coordinate with Sales on pricing adjustments, change order negotiations, and contract amendments.
• Initiate and drive Engineering Change Requests (ECRs) and associated commercial claims toward the customer; ensure all scope changes are properly documented and priced.
• Support the Sales organisation in contract and SLA discussions related to active programmes; flag commercial risks early.
• Monitor and report programme profitability indicators in coordination with Finance and Sales.

Quality Topics — Customer Interface

• Act as the customer-facing owner for all quality topics in the project: 8D reports, initial sample (PPAP/ISIR) submissions, customer quality audits, and field quality issues.
• Coordinate with the internal Project Quality Manager (PQM) and SQM to ensure customer quality requirements are correctly understood, communicated internally, and met on time.
• Lead or co-lead customer quality review meetings; present EagleWireless’s quality status, corrective action plans, and improvement measures.
• Manage customer scorecards and quality KPIs; track EagleWireless’s rating with each customer and drive improvement where needed.

Production & Series Topics

• Manage the customer interface during the production ramp-up and series phase: coordinate delivery schedules, call-off management, and capacity confirmations with internal Production and Logistics.
• Handle customer escalations related to delivery performance, packaging, labelling, or logistics; coordinate resolutions internally and communicate outcomes to the customer.
• Own the customer-facing aspects of Engineering Changes (ECs) in series production: customer approval, timing, and impact communication.
• Support the smooth transition from development project to series supply, ensuring all customer-specific production and logistics requirements are captured and implemented.

Reporting & Governance

• Prepare and deliver regular customer-facing project status reports, covering schedule, quality, open issues, and commercial status.
• Maintain a customer communication log and action tracker; ensure all customer commitments are tracked and closed on time.
• Report programme health and customer relationship status to the Head of EPM and relevant internal stakeholders.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree or above in Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field; a combination of technical and commercial education is a strong advantage.
• PMP, IPMA, or equivalent project management certification is preferred.
• Key Account Management or automotive sales/commercial training is a plus.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in a customer-facing project management or key account management role in the automotive supply chain.
• Proven experience handling both commercial and technical topics simultaneously in a tier-1 or tier-2 automotive supplier environment.
• Track record of successfully managing customer escalations, change requests, and quality issues in an automotive series production context.
• Good understanding of automotive NAD, telematics, or embedded electronics product development — sufficient to engage credibly with customer engineering teams and translate technical constraints into commercial/schedule language.
• Solid knowledge of the automotive project management framework: APQP, PPAP, IATF 16949, VDA 6.3, and customer-specific requirements (e.g. VW Group, BMW Group, Mercedes-Benz, Harman, Bosch, or similar).
• Familiarity with automotive commercial processes: ECR/ECN management, SOP/EOL planning, series contract structures.
• Understanding of automotive logistics and production processes (Kanban, call-off systems, JIT/JIS) is advantageous.

Skills

• Exceptional communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills — comfortable representing EagleWireless at all levels of a customer organisation.
• Strong ability to hold firm on EagleWireless’s position while maintaining a constructive and solution-oriented customer relationship.
• Structured, organised, and able to manage multiple customer programmes simultaneously without losing attention to detail.
• Proficiency with project management and reporting tools, e.g. MS Project, JIRA, Confluence, SAP (for order/commercial tracking).
• Fluent English (mandatory); German is strongly preferred for a Kronach-based role; Mandarin Chinese is a significant advantage given customer and team composition.

What do we have to offer you?

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses
• Opportunities for professional growth and development
• Supportive team culture with strong leadership

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted!