Technical Program Manager

Job Description

As television and media habits change, our mission remains true to the principles that founded Discovery – every day we seek to ignite people's curiosity to engage, entertain and enlighten the world around them through amazing viewing experiences.

The Direct to Consumer Group is a technology company within the Discovery brand. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT), and a suite of applications to support all of our network's brands globally. We are building modern container-based micro-services operated on AWS. Our platform covers everything from search, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and really much more. We build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications. We build for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of Discovery owned networks (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play, and many more) This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery's future.

We are hiring senior technical program managers to join our team. We focus on all aspects of streaming video: live and VOD pipelines, metadata transformation, server-side ad insertion, CDN integrations, playback services, video player backends, and AI/ML-based personalization. The ideal candidate has a track record of having built multiple high-performance, stable, scalable systems that have been successfully shipped to customers in production. Your work and your approach to work are exemplary: you drive best practices and set standards for your team. You are a key influencer in your team's strategy and contribute significantly to team planning. You show good judgement making trade-offs between immediate and long-term business needs. You are a collaborative partner that makes other team members around you more productive, by sharing your knowledge, and helping to tie-break key technical decisions. You provide mentoring to others.

Responsibilities
• Partner with key stakeholders at different Discovery brands to understand their current platform needs and anticipate future platform needs. You will need to gather and synthesize requirements from many different brands across a diverse set of geographies, time zones, and use cases into a consistent re-usable platform design that can serve them all.

• In concert with engineering, create and review detailed functional designs that unambiguously specify all public behaviors and interfaces, provide test examples, enumerate and describe all edge conditions, and define operational success criteria and KPI goals, which will then be used by engineering for technical designs. Technical program management will provide the ''why'' and the ''what'', while engineering provides the ''how''.

• Make sure your designs fit into the larger DTC platform, collaborating with other teams on consistency and cross-team integrations, leveraging existing patterns and strategies, and staying up to date on high-level roadmaps and challenges across the teams.

• Work with engineering to translate functional designs into user stories, provide insights on the functional repercussions of particular technical choices and challenges technical choices when necessary, adapt functional designs to fit schedule constraints, and manage and prioritize the story backlog

• Always be shipping: you will drive all processes around delivering the right software on time and on budget. You will participate in daily scrums and meta-scrums, pro-actively anticipate bottlenecks or resource contention, unblock development, triage issues, modify or rescope stories to reduce risk, and accept stories when they are done.

• Regularly engage stakeholders and external teams to communicate the status of various in-flight development, and anticipate the result of schedule changes to other teams

• Analyze and track operational KPIs that you own, finding the right roadmap blend between new feature work and maintenance/sustained engineering. You will be responsible for maintaining the general operational snapshot of your feature area and presenting it as necessary.

• During live-site escalations, provide leadership and analysis based on your understanding of customer use-cases. You will be paged if your service tips over: so make sure your functional design is resilient.

• Participate in the review of outages and provide feedback to prevent future occurrences.

• Do outreach and evangelism to brands and other platform teams, maintaining and presenting the roadmap presentation for your area

Requirements
• At least 5 years technical program management experience in a software product development environment including direct experience in operational cloud computing applications.

• Proven design experience with SOA, design patterns, and web service technologies.

• At least 4 years software experience at an engineering level highly preferred.

• Proven experience as a technical leader. Demonstrated ability to lead the design and development of complex applications.

• Strong sense of responsibility and ownership for the success of projects from inception to rollout and maintenance.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Ability and confidence to work closely with select customers in pre-sales and collaborative scenarios.

• A BS degree in computer science or a related field is required.

• Knowledge of video encoding and video delivery highly preferred

• Must have the legal right to work in the United States

Nearest Major Market: Seattle

Nearest Secondary Market: Bellevue

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-gq876x-18-224-149-242-42 in your application.