Lead Technical Program Manager - Activision

Activision Blizzard, Inc.

$114K — $211K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of experience in technical program, product, or project management with data/software teams.
  • Hands-on experience as a data analyst/engineer or equivalent technical contributor preferred.
  • Proficiency in SQL for data inspection and quality validation.
  • Understanding of data lifecycle processes and system integrations.
  • Proven capability to lead complex projects across multiple teams and adapt to dynamic priorities.
  • Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, for technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Experience with project management tools like Jira and collaboration platforms such as Slack.

Responsibilities

  • Own planning and delivery across data activation and analytics engineering projects.
  • Clarify goals and requirements as the program lead across various teams.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering leads to shape project roadmaps.
  • Perform SQL validation and troubleshooting to resolve issues efficiently.
  • Drive execution of various workstreams, managing milestones and risks.
  • Utilize technical knowledge to understand data structures and integrations.
  • Establish operating mechanisms for project intake and governance.

Benefits

  • Onsite work schedule Monday through Thursday.
  • Collaborative work environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Opportunities for professional growth and technical development.
Full Job Description
Job Title:
Lead Technical Program Manager - Activision

Requisition ID:
R028027

Job Description:

Your Mission

Publishing's Data and Analytics Engineering team builds and operates the data products, pipelines, and integrations that turn trusted data into action across our Studios, Analytics, Product, Finance, and Marketing Technology ecosystem. We are looking for a Lead Technical Project Manager to serve as the connective layer across these disciplines - bringing structure to ambiguous problems, translating business priorities into executable technical plans, and driving complex initiatives from intake through launch.

This is a highly cross-functional role for someone who combines strong program leadership with practical data and software fluency. You will partner closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, product and business leaders, and platform teams to align priorities, manage dependencies, resolve issues, and ensure our solutions are reliable, scalable, and useful.

This role is based in our Los Angeles (Pen Factory) office and follows an onsite work schedule of Monday through Thursday. Work arrangements may change at the company's discretion to meet business needs.

What You Bring to the Table

Priorities can shift quickly in a fast-paced environment, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:
  • Own end-to-end planning and delivery across a portfolio of data activation, analytics engineering, and data platform integration initiatives.
  • Serve as the program lead across Studios, Analytics, Finance, Marketing Technology, and engineering teams-clarifying goals, requirements, ownership, dependencies, and success measures.
  • Partner with engineering and product leadership to shape roadmaps, sequence work, and align team capacity with business priorities and customer commitments.
  • Perform SQL-based validation or optimization and first-pass troubleshooting to accelerate issue resolution and route deeper investigation effectively.
  • Drive execution across concurrent workstreams by managing milestones, risks, trade-offs, decisions, release coordination, migrations, and operational readiness.
  • Use technical expertise to understand data flows, schemas, APIs, models, and system integrations.
  • Establish scalable operating mechanisms for intake, prioritization, status reporting, decision logs, documentation, service ownership, and governance-related workflows.
  • Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to engineering teams, business partners, and senior leaders, tailoring the level of detail to the audience.
  • Define and track meaningful outcomes-including adoption, data quality, reliability, timeliness, and delivery predictability-and use retrospectives to improve how teams work together.


Player Profile
  • 7+ years of technical program, product, or project management experience working directly with data, software, platform, or infrastructure engineering teams.
  • Prior hands-on experience as a data analyst/engineer, technical analyst, or another technical individual contributor is strongly preferred; equivalent technical depth is also welcome.
  • Working proficiency with SQL, including the ability to inspect schemas, validate outputs, investigate data quality issues, and govern access.
  • Practical understanding of the data lifecycle, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, batch and streaming pipelines, APIs, semantic or metrics layers, and downstream activation.
  • Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional programs across multiple teams and organizations while navigating ambiguity and evolving priorities.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate technical concepts, constraints, and trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership.
  • Exceptional prioritization, time management, and follow-through, with a bias toward action and the ability to distinguish urgent work from important long-term investments.
  • Experience with Jira, Confluence, Slack, M365, or similar collaboration tools, and comfort working across Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid delivery models.
  • AI fluency, including experience supporting AI/ML programs or using AI-assisted tools to improve planning, documentation, QA, incident analysis, or self-service data access.
  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.


Extra Points
  • Experience with modern data platforms and tooling such as Git, lakehouse or cloud data warehouse architectures, dbt, Airflow, Spark, Kafka, data observability, catalogs, or governance platforms.
  • Experience with data activation or Marketing Technology ecosystems, including customer data platforms, reverse ETL, identity resolution, campaign platforms, experimentation, or measurement and conversion APIs.
  • Experience supporting Finance, enterprise reporting, privacy- or compliance-sensitive workflows, or distributed multi-studio environments.
  • Demonstrated portfolio-level leadership and mentoring experience for Lead consideration.
  • PMP, Certified Scrum Master, PRINCE2, or similar certification.

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