Sr Technical Program Mgr

The Walt Disney Company • Santa Monica, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more, working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally. The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. The Business Operations team helps guide and articulate technology strategy and research, and is responsible for driving the day-to-day operation of the Product & Technology organization, including project and portfolio management and tracking; organization-level capital, space, and resource management and allocation; process management; technical incident management; and our administrative and workplace experience support team. This position is within the DE&E Technology: Business Operations - Global Program Management organization, supporting our Ad Platforms technology group. The Technical Program Manager will focus on the planning and execution of complex programs that may span several areas of Ad Platforms, or may cut across the department and other DEE Technology groups. This position requires proven experience in program management. Ideal candidates must be highly proactive, detail-oriented, and able to autonomously work on multiple assignments. They must be capable of attaining a strong understanding of technical details and clearly communicating schedules, risks, status, and processes to a variety of business and technical audiences. They must be able to partner closely with project managers and technical leads to coordinate schedules, deliverables, and dependencies.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience managing large-scale, strategic, software development programs in a well-established global technology organization
• Proven ability to facilitate effective communication across disparate teams
• Expertise in Agile or Waterfall program management methods that may include Scrum, Kanban, and/or Scaled Agile
• Evidence of strong planning, delivery, and problem-solving skills
• Superb written and verbal communications, presentation skills, and meeting facilitation skills (especially when working with senior leadership)
• BA/BS or equivalent experience required

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in a media technology environment
• Ad tech domain knowledge, or demonstrated aptitude for learning a technology-based engineering domain
• Formal project management certifications

Responsibilities

• Drive activities for large, strategic, technically complex, priority programs
• Develop plans and timelines, accounting for all dependencies
• Ensure transparency of progress and issues/risks.
• Proactively drive risk mitigation and contingency planning, along with issue resolution
• Communicate status, updates, and program summaries via presentations, email, and direct communication with key stakeholders and executive leadership
• Ensure that all involved parties understand and accept their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable to their deliverables
• Facilitate all build activities (including QA), as per plan
• Proactively drive, track, and report on budgets
• Perform capacity planning for teams
• Collaborate with other program management colleagues to coordinate activities across multiple technology teams
• Strong understanding of most program domain technical components, including architecture, tools and deployment practices that development team is employing, including cross-system interactions and dependencies
• Track and report key program metrics, informing stakeholders as appropriate
• Independently manage activities and resolve conflict within associated teams, with minimal influence from management
• Effortlessly sift through “noise” and facilitate discussions and activities with a laser focus towards results
• Navigate the TWDC to effectively drive progress, even when the scope of responsibilities may be unclear
• Exemplify leadership characteristics through collaboration, work ethic, and creative thinking. Strive to inspire others and deliver the best possible outputs
• Coordinate with external vendors, where applicable
• May manage Agile ceremonies and processes at the team-of-teams level

Benefits

• A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

What This Job Offers

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