A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology
**Building the future of Disney’s media business: **DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.
Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is focused on providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers around the world, powered by exceptional technology. This strategic work requires streamlining and repurposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business.
Job Summary:
The role Director of Strategic Operations is critical to the delivery of the Disney Entertainment & ESPN technology initiatives. This role reports to the SVP of Media Engineering, Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology.
You’ll play an essential role in leading, driving, and executing for ME deliverables and strategies based on data and insights. A typical day may include you presenting a roadmap review to regional stakeholder executives, meeting with engineering peer leaders to stack rank cross-functional initiatives, a deep dive with engineering architects to capture key requirements and plan strategic execution across departments, following through with finance and portfolio team to ensure the business impact is appropriately accounted for. Lead cross-functional teams through influence. This role will have the responsibility to make recommendations, influence and execute strategic plans as well as have the ability to roll up their sleeves to be tactical reviewing data, creating reporting, tracking, and analyzing.
The right candidate must be technically confident across a breadth of engineering disciplines, assertive, passionate about technology, and equally comfortable engaging everyone from the President level to individual engineers.
Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:
Analytics
Works with large amounts of data.
Map inputs such as engineering JIRA boards, Smartsheets, Wiki, complex google sheets and engineering Airtable to drive clarity on ambiguous projects.
Manage the ME budget for CapEx and Opex, including investment in FTE and contract resources, technology partnerships and vendors, and underlying engineering services and infrastructure dependencies.
Manages, consolidates, trends and analyzes data to manage current deliverables and strategically makes predictions for future results.
Review and drive metrics and KPIs to be sure material is ready for leadership review.
Manage various reporting cycles across the department, to ensure timely information is collected, merged, filtered, and edited for
Act as an escalation point and support structure for Media departments navigating internal process and review, keeping department leaders and engineering teams unblocked.
Manage and support a small team of business analysts to delegate and ensure the ability to be responsive and scale with the needs of ME.
Strategy
Present the engineering Roadmap to peer technology teams and business stakeholder groups.
Lead the definition process for the ME team’s yearly and quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and implement standardized tracking and reporting of progress.
Directly contribute to the long-term strategic vision for the ME team while helping to keep 8+ departments engaged appropriately with the roadmap and technical or personal goals.
Support SVP, ME in partnership with HR to advise on appropriate headcount & resourcing prioritization across ME.
Support recognition and reward programs for Media along with communications, including town halls, rotating team reviews, and newsletters.
Support strategic vendor relationship management and business processes, including sourcing, bidding, negotiation, relationship, capacity, and traffic balancing.
Drive a learning and development program across ME to assist in onboarding and knowledge sharing of specialized media knowledge, practical systems knowledge, and strategic guidance - in partnership with engineering leadership and comms teams.
Represent Media's strategy, organizational structure, and overall capabilities to outside teams.
Collaboration
Rationalize business inputs including partner and stakeholder requirements, financial constraints, and engineering resources to lead cross-functional engineering strategy.
Partner with department heads, program management, and business stakeholders to stack rank engineering initiatives across ME/DE&ET.
Support Media's engagement with legal, including supporting litigation activities, legal contract review, and extensive engagement with the Disney patent program.
Leadership
Act as an escalation point and support structure for Media departments navigating internal process and review, keeping department leaders and engineering teams unblocked.
Manage and support a small team of business analysts to delegate and ensure the ability to be responsive and scale with the needs of ME.
Process improvement and compliance
Drive the investment process with portfolio teams to ensure compliance and optimal use of CER/CAR for proper accounting of complex technical projects.
Drive continuous improvement by helping drive strategy within the ME organization, clarity around the operational framework, effectiveness and cohesion around initiatives including measurement, management, and communication of work.
Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:
**Basic Qualifications **
Minimum of 10 years of relevant work experience.
Prior success in building and executing engineering roadmaps for technology capabilities at a global business.
Data-driven approach with demonstrated ability to use data to drive decisions, provide recommendations and support against the roadmap with the ability to pivot as needed.
Excellent communication and leadership skills including presentation to large audiences including senior executives.
Ability to work with engineering teams to discuss technical concepts, remove roadblocks, evaluate alternative approaches and make critical prioritization decisions.
Ability to manage the social landscape with a demonstrated ability to build relationships, negotiate, and provide different perspectives and opinions to senior leaders across the company for a global footprint.
Customer experiences are prioritized.
Experience with a variety of tools, dashboards to effectively navigate data.
**Preferred Qualifications **
Experience with:
Expert with visualization tools, dashboards, internal tools, excel, smartsheets, etc.
Proficiency with core Engineering Management tool suites, including JIRA, wiki, Airtable, Smartsheets, Google Sheets, and/or purpose-built internal tooling
**Required Education **
The hiring range for this position in California is $199,000 to $292,200 per year and in New York and Seattle is $208,400 to $279,500 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.