Program Manager

Job Description

Discovery is looking for a Senior Program Manager to join our Direct To Consumer (DTC) Technology Team. We are looking for that rare candidate with a strong technical background, exemplary written and verbal communication skills, strong organizational skills, and the ability to thrive with little process, direction, or oversight. This is a role inside a fast-paced start-up environment where we are also building process and structure befitting a major corporate entity. This position will appeal to a person who is excited by ambiguity and new product development while yearning to help shape project and portfolio management practices and help establishing the overall strategy of the DTC Technology space.

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 Discovery Inc. With Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play, and many more brands to support, we build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications for smart TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles.

To support these experiences, we are building a global streaming video platform and a suite of applications to support all our network’s brands globally. The services are modern container-based micro-services operated on AWS, covering everything from search, catalog, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions. The device platform spans consoles, smart TVs, web, mobile phones, and tablets. This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery’s future.

Responsibilities

We are looking for a senior program manager to manage technical programs. The ideal candidate communicates clearly, organizes project timelines, secures commitments, manages risks, identifies the critical path, spots edge cases, reviews metrics & data, and monitors operations within the DTC Technology Portfolio. The ideal candidate can switch effortlessly between these modes adapting themselves to the needs of their work streams. They are a strong self-starter and therefore can drill into business data and research results to identify clear direction and focus for their tasks, projects and programs. They continue to move forward in the face of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge. Their interest in computer science has not faded as they moved into a project management role and they are still comfortable with technical details and giving regular feedback to engineers on their projects.

The ideal candidate has had experience with multiple high-performance, stable, scalable customer facing applications (Web, IOS and Android mobile apps, Connected TV apps such as FireTV and Roku) and possesses a strong technical program management background. They have demonstrated experience leading medium to large projects. They have experience in service-oriented architecture, project management and agile development methodologies with a proven track record of delivering results. They must be able to thrive and succeed in an entrepreneurial and environment and not be hindered by ambiguity or competing priorities. 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

Requirements
• Bachelor’s degree with 10 years of experience (or master’s with 8 years) in project management in the technology realm.

• Technical background in software engineering or related field, ideally with professional experience as a software engineer.

• Must have experience with OTT, media streaming and technologies related to video delivery across different platforms (iOS, Android, Web, tvOS, etc.)

• Strong self-starter with a proven ability to drill into business data and research results to identify clear direction and focus for your projects and programs

• Lead planning, execution and delivery of projects across multiple teams (product and technology) around the world

• Leverage your deep technical expertise, strong problem-solving skills and excellent leadership skills to come up with new ways to get things done

• Communicate clearly, analyze technical designs, organize project timelines, secure commitments, manage risks, identify the critical path, spot edge cases, triage bugs, review metrics and data, and monitor launch operations for large software projects

• Switch effortlessly between the above modes, adapting yourself to the needs of your workstreams

• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs.

• Continue to move forward in the face of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge

• Have an active interest in Computer Science and showcase you are comfortable with technical details, providing regular and constructive design feedback to Engineers on their projects

• Own communication for technical delivery across these projects and programs with senior leadership and partner organizations.

• You have a solid understanding of software development methods like CI/CD, Agile Scrum, Waterfall, etc.

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• You have shipped multiple high impact projects and used data to assess their impact.

• You have experience with all phases of project delivery from concept to production, including defining features and deliverables, securing team commitments, establishing a project charter, handling all communication and reporting, overseeing development & deployment, and performing retrospective assessment using data and key performance indicators.

• You have demonstrated the ability to make decisions for more than one project or program area showing that your judgment is fungible, and you may be to handle more than one project simultaneously and successfully.

• You have demonstrated the ability to manage a technology portfolio and have good experience in demand management (intake, prioritization, etc.), resource capacity management (headcount planning, work allocation, hiring, etc.), annual operating planning, road-mapping, risk management, and program/project management standards and templates.

• You have contributed to establishing a technology organizations strategy, governed it and communicated it broadly.

• You have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to understand organizational and corporate goals and ensured that your projects delivered what was required to hit these goals.

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• You can plan budgets, adjust forecasts as necessary and track financial performance of an organization.

• You have demonstrated your written and verbal communication skills can be applied to business and technical areas across all levels, from the engineering teams to senior level executives.

• You have deep knowledge surrounding the PPM (Project Portfolio Management) discipline and are familiar with standard PPM tools offered in the industry.

• You MUST have experience with JIRA, Confluence, and Microsoft Suite of products.

• You have had experience managing vendors and assets in the form of software and hardware.


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Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d8yekg-18-191-189-85-42 in your application.