Customer Program Manager - Semiconductor

Customer Program Manager (CPM)

The Customer Program Manager (CPM) leads end-to-end delivery of customer programs, cooperating with technical teams (CS, Product and R&D) to translate customer requirements into coordinated cross-functional plans and ensuring successful delivery driving execution from program initiation through production deployment and customer acceptance.

The role sits at the intersection of customer, business, product and engineering execution.

Success in this role requires a combination of strong program management discipline, technical credibility, customer leadership and the ability to influence without direct authority.

The role ensures that the company delivers what was committed to the customer while continuously bringing the customer's voice, requirements and priorities back into Valens.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and manage program schedules, deliverables, and milestones aligned with customer roadmaps and requirements.
• Work with technical team to convert customer requirements into actionable tasks for all functional teams, driving timely issue resolution across engineering, quality, logistics, and sales.
• Drive cross-functional program execution, manage high-priority issues and concerns, and coordinate globally distributed teams to maintain alignment on objectives.
• Facilitating program kickoffs, technical discussions, design reviews, issue and bug tracking and resolution, customer qualification and validation activities, and status updates throughout the product lifecycle.
• Drive for a successful production deployment through on-time delivery, quality execution, and customer acceptance.
• Proactively communicate program health, risks, and key issues to customers, internal partners, and leadership across hardware, software, operations, business, quality, sales, and product teams, ensuring transparency and alignment.
• Establish credibility with customers by understanding their product roadmaps, development cycles, decision processes and success criteria.
• Manage customer expectations, commitments and escalations, ensuring clear ownership and timely closure.
• Partner closely with Sales and Business Development to ensure program execution supports customer and commercial objectives.
• Support forecasting and planning for engineering samples, evaluation kits, production ramp and customer demand.
• Provide structured customer feedback to Product Management and R&D to influence product priorities and future roadmaps.
• Identify opportunities to expand customer engagement, strengthen strategic relationships and create additional business value.

• Own high-priority customer issues from identification through resolution, coordinating the appropriate internal experts and communicating progress to the customer.
• Ensure lessons learned are captured and translated into improvements in products, processes and customer engagement

Key Success Measures

• Customer satisfaction, trust and strength of strategic customer relationships.
• Successful execution of customer programs against committed milestones, quality and launch objectives.
• Timely qualification, design-in, production ramp and customer acceptance.
• Fast and effective resolution of customer issues and escalations.
• Clear internal alignment and accountability across all functions involved in the customer program.
• Accurate visibility of program health, risks, dependencies and customer commitments.
• Positive contribution to customer retention, design wins, revenue growth and future business opportunities.

Position Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Proven program/project management experience in the semiconductor, automotive, or embedded systems industries.
• Strong technical background in hardware and/or software product development with experience working closely with customers. Semiconductor experience is highly preferred.
• Track record of leading complex, global programs through full development lifecycles into deployment and production.
• Strong program management, communication, and organizational skills, with the ability to prioritize issues and build cross-functional alignment.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to audiences ranging from engineers to executives.
• Strong business acumen and ability to understand the connection between customer requirements, product roadmap, technical execution and commercial outcomes.
• Experience working in a global, multicultural environment with distributed engineering and customer teams.

Key Competencies

• Customer-oriented leadership: builds trust, understands customer priorities and represents the customer internally.
• Influence without authority: creates alignment and accountability across a matrix organization.
• Program discipline: strong planning, prioritization, risk management and execution skills.

• Executive communication: communicates complex issues clearly and concisely to customers, senior management and technical teams.
• Problem solving: structured, pragmatic and decisive when facing ambiguity, competing priorities or unexpected issues.
• Ownership and accountability: personally, drives issues to closure and does not rely solely on functional ownership.
• Commercial awareness: understands customer value, business impact and the importance of timing in customer product development cycles.
• Adaptability and resilience: comfortable operating in a fast paced environment with changing customer requirements and aggressive timelines.