Lead Technical Program Manager

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET) is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more—all working to advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business worldwide.

We marry technology with creativity, building world-class products, enhancing storytelling experiences, and driving innovation, scale, and velocity across the enterprise. Our team shapes every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio—helping serve millions globally, every day.

This Lead Technical Program Manager (TPM) position sits within the Product & Technology (P&T) Technology Enablement Alliance (TEA). You’ll play a leadership role in delivering and enhancing key business tools and services, partnering closely with Cloud Engineering and Cloud Account Management teams. This is a highly technical environment involving integrated COTS (commercial off‑the‑shelf) systems and custom products that require adept program management and stakeholder engagement.

These high visibility systems are serving business clients that have been shuffled and merged repeatedly - the deployments are complicated and inconsistently documented.  The nature of these programs involves stakeholders ranging from business SVPs to engineers and everyone in between  - each must be effectively engaged and communicated with. 

Our ideal candidate is intuitive, autonomous, has a high degree of technical literacy and a desire to know more.  They are proactive, detail-oriented, and comfortable quickly switching roles from detective to executive communicator to engineering advocate.

Responsibilities:

• Drive, organize, and prioritize high-profile, cross-functional initiatives with minimal oversight, ensuring clarity, progress, and quality throughout delivery.
• Own processes around project management—structuring and executing initiatives, tracking resource allocation, and highlighting project status transparently.
• Improve team throughput by identifying bottlenecks, implementing process improvements, and championing automation to avoid queues and reduce manual effort.
• Coordinate cross-functional communication and foster effective stakeholder relationships, ensuring alignment across engineers, managers, and executive sponsors.
• Maintain thorough documentation and detail-oriented tracking of all project deliverables and outcomes.

You Will Also:

• Develop a fundamental technical understanding of the tools and infrastructure your teams manage, including Terraform, Infrastructure as Code (IoC), IAM, Private Links, and VPCs.
• Proactively surface input and ensure accountability across teams that include introverted or quieter members, holding individuals and teams to high standards with empathy and servant leadership.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies for multiple engineering teams and drive collaboration in a distributed team environment.
• Effectively negotiate project expectations and realistic deadlines, communicating clearly to diverse stakeholders.
• Assist in team resource planning in partnership with engineering managers.
• Identify, capture, and report on key delivery metrics to ensure transparency throughout the project lifecycle.

Qualifications:

• Detail oriented and excellent communication skills; ability to follow technical discussions and absorb technical documentation; ability to develop fundamental technical understanding of the project deliverables
• Demonstrated tenacity and comfortable with ambiguity; able to drive consensus between cross-functional stakeholder groups
• Experience playing a leadership role in highly integrated COTS implementation experience
• ​​Experience managing senior-level client relationships and effectively and efficiently communicating program vision and status in monthly business reviews
• Experience working with distributed teams and/or distributed organizations
• Experience supported agile software development teams
• Deep understanding of SDLC
• Working knowledge cloud infrastructure – Terraform, IOC, IAM, Private links, VPCs
• Working knowledge of Jira

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
• Working knowledge cloud infrastructure – Terraform, IOC, IAM, Private links, VPCs
• Tools expertise including AirTable, Google Suite, and MS Teams

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $155,700.00 to $208,700.00 per year, and in New York, NY is $163,100.00 to $218,700.00 per year. 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.