Technical Program Manager, Customer Programs

Technical Program Manager, Customer Deployment

At Hayden AI, we are on a mission to harness the power of computer vision to transform the way transit systems and other government agencies address real-world challenges.

From bus lane and bus stop enforcement to transportation optimization technologies and beyond, our innovative mobile perception system empowers our clients to accelerate transit, enhance street safety, and drive toward a sustainable future.

Job Summary: The Technical Program Manager, Customer Deployment will own the execution of active customer deployments from contract handoff through field go-live. Working closely with Project Engineers (PEs), this person coordinates day-to-day delivery across multiple simultaneous deployments, serves as the primary program-level point of contact for municipal customers post-sale, and ensures field realities feed back into engineering and operations. This is a hands-on execution role with direct customer exposure and real ownership over outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Deployment Program Management: Own the end-to-end program plan for multiple simultaneous customer deployments — tracking milestones, managing dependencies, coordinating across internal teams, and keeping delivery on schedule from contract handoff to field go-live.
• Project Engineer Coordination: Act as program lead across a portfolio of active deployments, coordinating and unblocking Project Engineers embedded in each engagement. Provide structure, escalation paths, and cross-deployment visibility that individual PEs can't maintain on their own.
• Customer Engagement: Serve as the program-level point of contact for municipal customers post-sale — communicating status, managing expectations, surfacing risks early, and maintaining trust through the deployment lifecycle.
• Field Feedback Loop: Capture and translate deployment learnings — installation challenges, configuration issues, operational friction — into structured input for engineering, hardware, and operations teams to act on.
• Scope & Requirements Tracking: Partner with Growth and Operations to ensure customer commitments are clearly scoped before deployment begins, and track scope changes through delivery to protect both the customer relationship and engineering capacity.
• Risk & Issue Management: Identify and escalate deployment risks before they become customer-facing misses. Maintain clear issue logs, owners, and resolution timelines across all active programs.
• Deployment Readiness: Drive pre-deployment readiness reviews — ensuring hardware, software, configuration, and field logistics are aligned before go-live commitments are made to customers.
• Process Improvement: Document what works and what doesn't across deployments. Contribute to the playbooks, templates, and checklists that make the next deployment faster and more predictable than the last.
• Cross-Functional Coordination: Work across Engineering, Hardware, Operations, and Growth to keep deployment programs moving — pulling in the right people at the right time without requiring escalation to senior leadership for routine unblocking.

First Year Impact In your first year, you will: own end-to-end delivery of multiple active customer deployments simultaneously; establish a repeatable deployment program structure that Project Engineers can operate within; and become the person customers and internal teams rely on to know where things stand and what happens next.

Required Qualifications:

• B.S. in an engineering discipline or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years in Technical Program Management, Project Management, or a related delivery role
• Experience managing multiple concurrent programs or projects with external stakeholders
• Comfortable in direct customer or client-facing roles — able to communicate program status clearly and manage expectations under pressure
• Strong cross-functional coordination skills: able to drive delivery across engineering, operations, and field teams without formal authority
• Organized, detail-oriented, and disciplined about tracking — nothing falls through the cracks

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with hardware deployment programs — physical products, field installation, or on-site commissioning
• Background in government, municipal, or public sector delivery (procurement timelines, compliance constraints, stakeholder dynamics)
• Familiarity with IoT, edge compute, computer vision, or fleet management systems
• Experience working alongside or coordinating junior technical staff (field engineers, project engineers, or similar)
• Comfort operating in an early-stage environment where playbooks are still being written