Product Manager - Tech

Job Description

Our mission at Discovery remains 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. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT), and a suite of applications and platform capabilities to support all of our network’s brands globally. Our platform covers everything from search, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and more. It powers 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 products (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 a Technical Product Leader to lead our AI/ML driven Personalization effort. You will drive the buildout of our end to end platform capability to personalize consumer experiences for all our products worldwide, reaching millions of consumers. These experiences will include personalized recommendations, artwork, anything. These products have a rich mix of complexity like video vs non-video content, entitlement schemes, interactive vs non-interactive content, and more; and you will build a flexible platform to handle all scenarios. You will own the strategy, define the platform product and make difficult, high-judgment trade-offs between features and time-to-market.

You will work across ML Engineering, Applied Science, Business, and Executives to drive this product. You will ensure the programming model, scalability and reliability promises, and developer experience delight our customers. As a leader in the team, you will play a key role in hiring additional team members the team, and help set the vision, values, and culture of this business.

The ideal candidate will have built multiple high-performance, stable, scalable personalization systems that have been successfully shipped to customers in production. You have an engineering / applied science background AND/OR have worked hand in hand with scientists to test among and choose the right algorithms to use for different scenarios. You are a key influencer of strategy for your team and business partners across the company, and you contribute significantly to company-wide plans. You exhibit strong judgement in making trade-offs between customer and business needs short and long term. You are a collaborative partner that makes your team and partners more productive, by sharing your knowledge, and helping to tie-break key technical and business decisions. You provide mentoring to others.

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

• Able to discuss relative merits of different machine learning approaches and algorithms (e.g. supervised vs unsupervised learning, regression vs neural networks) with applied data scientists and engineers, to determine best approaches to solve business and customer problems.

• 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

• Where necessary, serve as the ongoing direct liaison between a given brand’s team and the platform group, helping identify platform gaps and assisting the brand with a project or launch.

• Act as the subject-matter expert for their functional area for people outside of their team.

• Contribute to and review documentation for public-facing APIs and features

• Research potential partners to accelerate our roadmap by creating evaluation criteria, connecting and managing relationships with partners, and prototyping potential integrations

Requirements
• At least 7 years of Product Management experience for a technology / software product, with day to day understanding of the technologies involved.

• 4+ years of Software Engineering experience is highly preferred.

• 4+ years of Applied / Data Science background is highly preferred.

• Experience with microservices architectures, operational use of cloud computing applications.

• Experience building ML-driven applications from conception to deployment, including model selection, building, training, validation and scaling.

• Experience as a technical leader, leading 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. MS/PhD in CS or related discipline is preferred.

Nearest Major Market: Seattle

Nearest Secondary Market: Bellevue

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-dyjw5k-13-58-82-79-42 in your application.