Program Manager, Frontier AI

DeepMind•Mountain View, CA

28d

About The Position

Join Google DeepMind’s Frontier AI team as a Program Manager to drive the operational success of our external partnerships with world-class professionals. You will serve as the backbone for our creative engagements, ensuring that our technology lands successfully in professional workflows. You will bridge the gap between our research and real-world creative workflows, managing the full lifecycle of projects from "greenlight" to launch. About Us Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts, and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority. The Role As a Program Manager for Partnerships, you will manage a portfolio of high-touch engagements with top-tier creative partners (e.g., short films, feature films, music videos, and commercial campaigns). You will work at the intersection of Strategy, Creative Production, Research, and Operations. You will ensure that our collaborations are impactful and delivered on time. You will help define and exemplify the engagement model within Google DeepMind, establishing rigorous standards for how we best tackle partnerships internally and how we triage the complex needs of professional partners using experimental AI tools.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of experience in Program Management, Production Management, or Partnerships Operations, ideally within the Media & Entertainment or Creative Tech industries.
Demonstrated experience managing the lifecycle of creative projects (from pre-production to post-production and archiving).
Technical Fluency: Ability to understand Generative AI concepts (e.g., language models, diffusion models, latent space) well enough to communicate their impact on professional creative needs. Must be fluent in Media & Entertainment concepts including color space, dynamic range, bit depth, LUTs, compositing, rotoscoping, texturing, UV mapping, match-moving, frame rates, codecs, and asset management.
Experience establishing governance, guidelines, or standard operating procedures (SOPs) for cross-functional teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with film/VFX pipelines, animation workflows, or music production to deliver professional grade production ready outputs.
Familiarity with production management software (e.g., ShotGrid/Flow Capture) or digital asset management systems.
Familiarity with Generative AI tools (e.g., Flow, ComfyUI, Freepik or similar tools)
Experience handling complex stakeholder negotiations regarding credits, billing, or asset rights.
A passion for the future of filmmaking and the role AI plays in the creative process.

Responsibilities

Partnership & Engagement Management: Drive the execution of multiple concurrent creative collaborations, serving as the primary operational link between external production partners and internal GDM teams. Ensure partners have the necessary tool access and compute resources and triage blockers immediately.
Project Lifecycle: Maintain a schedule of engagements to monitor resource utilization and forecast team availability.
Asset Governance: Define and implement a robust archiving strategy, establish databases to track workflows, shots, and prompts for provenance and posterity, and manage "cold storage" protocols for asset delivery to ensure future accessibility.
Production Systems Development: Lead the evaluation of production management infrastructures. Contribute to the strategy for AI-first production tools. Facilitate team access to production software like Shotgrid/Lucid Link etc.
Feedback Loop Management: Systematize the flow of feedback from professional creatives back to our research teams. Ensure that insights are captured and translated into prioritized roadmap items for the ProModel and ProTool teams.
Launch Management: Work with internal partners to drive approvals and complete necessary steps to launch bespoke models.
Operational Excellence: Manage timelines, milestones, and deliverables for high-stakes engagements. Anticipate risks in the creative production pipeline and coordinate across Legal, Marketing, and Partnerships to ensure smooth "Go-To-Market" moments.