Lead Technical Program Manager - Activision

Activision • Santa Monica, CA

14d • $114,080 - $211,048 • Onsite

About The Position

Publishing’s Data and Analytics Engineering team builds and operates the data products, pipelines, and integrations that turn trusted data into action across our Studios, Analytics, Product, Finance, and Marketing Technology ecosystem. We are looking for a Lead Technical Project Manager to serve as the connective layer across these disciplines - bringing structure to ambiguous problems, translating business priorities into executable technical plans, and driving complex initiatives from intake through launch. This is a highly cross-functional role for someone who combines strong program leadership with practical data and software fluency. You will partner closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, product and business leaders, and platform teams to align priorities, manage dependencies, resolve issues, and ensure our solutions are reliable, scalable, and useful.

Requirements

• 7+ years of technical program, product, or project management experience working directly with data, software, platform, or infrastructure engineering teams.
• Prior hands-on experience as a data analyst/engineer, technical analyst, or another technical individual contributor is strongly preferred; equivalent technical depth is also welcome.
• Working proficiency with SQL, including the ability to inspect schemas, validate outputs, investigate data quality issues, and govern access.
• Practical understanding of the data lifecycle, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, batch and streaming pipelines, APIs, semantic or metrics layers, and downstream activation.
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional programs across multiple teams and organizations while navigating ambiguity and evolving priorities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate technical concepts, constraints, and trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Exceptional prioritization, time management, and follow-through, with a bias toward action and the ability to distinguish urgent work from important long-term investments.
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, Slack, M365, or similar collaboration tools, and comfort working across Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid delivery models.
• AI fluency, including experience supporting AI/ML programs or using AI-assisted tools to improve planning, documentation, QA, incident analysis, or self-service data access.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with modern data platforms and tooling such as Git, lakehouse or cloud data warehouse architectures, dbt, Airflow, Spark, Kafka, data observability, catalogs, or governance platforms.
• Experience with data activation or Marketing Technology ecosystems, including customer data platforms, reverse ETL, identity resolution, campaign platforms, experimentation, or measurement and conversion APIs.
• Experience supporting Finance, enterprise reporting, privacy- or compliance-sensitive workflows, or distributed multi-studio environments.
• Demonstrated portfolio-level leadership and mentoring experience for Lead consideration.
• PMP, Certified Scrum Master, PRINCE2, or similar certification.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end planning and delivery across a portfolio of data activation, analytics engineering, and data platform integration initiatives.
• Serve as the program lead across Studios, Analytics, Finance, Marketing Technology, and engineering teams—clarifying goals, requirements, ownership, dependencies, and success measures.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to shape roadmaps, sequence work, and align team capacity with business priorities and customer commitments.
• Perform SQL-based validation or optimization and first-pass troubleshooting to accelerate issue resolution and route deeper investigation effectively.
• Drive execution across concurrent workstreams by managing milestones, risks, trade-offs, decisions, release coordination, migrations, and operational readiness.
• Use technical expertise to understand data flows, schemas, APIs, models, and system integrations.
• Establish scalable operating mechanisms for intake, prioritization, status reporting, decision logs, documentation, service ownership, and governance-related workflows.
• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to engineering teams, business partners, and senior leaders, tailoring the level of detail to the audience.
• Define and track meaningful outcomes—including adoption, data quality, reliability, timeliness, and delivery predictability—and use retrospectives to improve how teams work together.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others
• Relocation assistance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree