Manager, Technical Program Management

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET), we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to improve flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DEET are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
• Innovation: We develop and complete groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

This is a Manager, Technical Program Management (TPM) position within the DEET Production Platforms - Shared Services organization. The Manager will play a leadership role in the delivery and enhancements of services and tools within the internal developer platform, across the Compliance & Metadata Management, Cost Management, and Data Store Services fleets.  The offerings of these fleets include cloud account management and managing a centralized source of truth for team and workload metadata; the strategy and implementation of immediate and long term usage efficiencies and cost avoidance; and building and supporting scalable, cost effective and secure data store solutions.

The role supports 90 engineers within the Production Platforms space through their  team of six to eight TPMs.  Ideal candidates must be highly proactive, detail-oriented, and able to autonomously work on multiple assignments that may span the broader organization. They are dedicated leaders, caring and mentoring their team and developing their careers.  Candidates must be capable of clearly communicating schedules, risks, status, and processes to various business and technical audiences. They will partner with program managers and technical leads outside their area to coordinate schedules and deliverables while aligning with their engineering leaders to refine internal processes and customize program management support, all aligned with improving engineering outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage a team of distributed Technical Project Managers (TPMs); effectively coaching, mentoring and growing their careers
• Accountable for the performance and results of a team in conducting technical projects or programs on time, within budget, and of the highest level of quality
• Collaborate with other program management colleagues to coordinate dependencies and activities across multiple technology teams
• Manages program portfolio level budget and drive capacity planning
• Lead not only at the strategic level, but also day-to-day by diving deeply into business and technical domains
• Understands architecture between systems across multiple domains. Able to speak to the overall workflow between these systems.
• Exemplify leadership characteristics through collaboration, work ethic, and creative thinking. Strive to inspire others and deliver the best possible outputs
• Partner with DPE engineering managers and leads to build a solid understanding of individual team needs and support TPMs in adapting their approach to support each team

Basic Qualifications:

• Minimum of 8+ years Technical Program Management experience with very strong facilitation, communication, planning and problem solving skills within technology organizations.
• 2+ years total of formal management experience
• Detail oriented and excellent communication skills; ability to direct technical discussions and facilitate communication across disparate teams
• Ability to manage through ambiguity, competing priorities, and shifting strategies
• Experience working with distributed teams and/or distributed organizations
• Aptitude to develop fundamental technical understanding of the tools and services vended by your teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Leads and promotes a positive and sustainable work environment
• A detailed knowledge of Agile development practices and a demonstrated ability to deliver high-impact features at scale
• Exposure to modern DevOps and SRE practices around CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Availability, etc
• Experience playing a leadership role in highly integrated COTS implementation experience
• Cloud based tooling expertise including AirTable, Atlassian Suite, Google Suite, and Slack or similar

Education

• Bachelor’s degree and/or equivalent work experience