Senior Technical Program Manager

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all 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. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come. 

Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.  

Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

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 is a Senior Technical Program Manager (TPM) position within the Product & Technology (P&T) Technology Enablement Alliance (TEA). The Senior Technical Program Manager will lead the planning and execution of programs designed by the Cost Management engineering teams in the development and support of tools that drive visibility, accountability, and efficiency in cloud spend.

Our TPMs partner with engineering managers and play a critical role in defining strategy, prioritizing initiatives, managing execution, and delivering data-driven insights that shape the technical roadmap.  In this role, the TPM must have a high degree of technical literacy, familiarity with budgeting, forecasting and cost analytics, and the ability to manage initiatives involving engineering and financial operations. Ideal candidates must be highly proactive, detail-oriented, possess the ability to work through unknowns, identify paths to success to ensure delivery, and be able to autonomously work on multiple, critical assignments that span the department.

Responsibilities:

• Effectively define and represent projects goals and plans; develop fundamental technical understanding of the project deliverables
• Enhance team throughput by removing roadblocks and leveraging organizational connections while helping to drive teams towards commitments
• Track progress against deliverables and work closely with the team to ensure on-time delivery
• Share concise and effective status information across multiple reporting formats to keep stakeholders informed and proactively communicate risks, forecasts, and dependencies.
• Facilitate technical and stakeholder meetings; follow the discussions in order to summarize and capture outcomes
• Foster cross-team coordination and communication
• Identify, maintain, and visualize metrics to guide the project lifecycle
• Assist with estimation and planning of team resourcing, in conjunction with engineering team manager
• Navigate competing and dynamic priorities, balance competing requests with agility

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of demonstrable experience managing technical projects in cloud or infrastructure environments within a fast-paced and dynamic organization, developing and executing project plans and delivery commitments.
• High degree of competency and proven success with project management including Agile Software Development Lifecycle methodology, identifying and managing risks, tracking dependencies and milestones and communication skills with the ability to translate technical concepts into business impact.
• Good understanding of cloud architecture and experience in data analysis and an understanding of core financial management practices of budgeting, forecasting, and cost analytics.
• Track record of creating and growing trusting, lasting professional relationships with diverse stakeholders, maturing team’s current engagements and advocating for future work.
• Experience in leading teams through operational improvements by re-engineering processes based on data-driven insights.
• Demonstrated tenacity and comfortable with ambiguity and can effectively partner with others to reduce ambiguity.
• Tools expertise including Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence), Google Suite, and MS Teams or similar.
• Experience working with distributed teams and/or distributed organizations.
• Bachelor’s degree required

Preferred Qualifications

• Degree in STEM and / or experience as a software engineer
• Exposure to modern DevOps and SRE practices around CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Availability, etc
• Prior experience as a software engineer

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $135,400.00 to $181,600.00 per year and in Los Angeles, CA is $129,300.00 to $173,300.00. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. 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.