DevOps Technical Project Manager

Magnopus is a connected spaces technology company founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences across the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.
Because we’re building the future, we endeavor to create a diverse, creative workplace where people from many perspectives collaborate across disciplines to create amazing things together. We invest in our employee's progression with ongoing education and mentorship opportunities through their guilds, and support their happiness and productivity through generous health care, time off, and other benefits.
We try to foster a safe environment where we can take risks, and learn from our failures. While we value individual talents, we favor teamwork more. We believe that the leadership of the company works for the employees, not the other way around. We feel strongly that our employees guide who we are as a company and the work we create, so we look for characteristics of curiosity, empathy, respect, honesty, and courage in every candidate.

Job Description

The DevOps Technical Project Manager serves as the program lead for the Pipeline team at Magnopus, which builds and supports the tools, automation, and workflows used on both our linear film and interactive projects. Working within agile development teams, this person plans, prioritizes, and tracks work, keeps the Pipeline roadmap aligned with the needs of every project in the studio, and clears the obstacles that slow down artists, engineers, and producers.
This role sits at the intersection of production and technology. It requires enough technical depth to understand how tools, builds, and pipelines fit together and to hold credible conversations with pipeline developers and engineers, along with a working understanding of how linear film pipelines move work from asset creation through final delivery. The position involves frequent interaction with Production, Engineering, creative leads, and studio leadership, and occasionally with vendors and partners. The individual must be able to promote collaborative decision-making, provide direction and a sense of urgency to the team, objectively evaluate risks, and make sound decisions with minimal guidance in a fast-moving studio environment with a certain degree of ambiguity.

Responsibilities

Project manage the Pipeline team using agile practices, including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, supporting all projects in the studio.
Partner with Production, Engineering, and creative leads to gather pipeline needs for every project, translate them into a prioritized backlog, and balance competing demands between linear film and interactive projects.
Track the dependencies between pipeline tools, workflows, and project milestones for both film and interactive work, and communicate the impact of changes, releases, and delays to the teams affected.
Own the planning toolchain: manage Jira projects, boards, workflows, and dashboards; maintain roadmaps, documentation, and decision logs in Confluence; and use Slack to keep teams and stakeholders informed.
Work with the team's tooling and source control (GitHub and Perforce) closely enough to understand release and integration status and to plan around them.
Create, develop, and manage schedules, roadmaps, and resource plans, and deliver within the time, budget, and resource constraints agreed with stakeholders.
Identify and manage risks, dependencies, and blockers across projects; create contingency plans and decide on and execute them when required.
Plan and track budgets for tools, licenses, and vendor services, always looking for ways to use resources efficiently and reduce cost.
Report program status to multi-tiered audiences including the team, peers, department heads, and executive staff.
Act as the bridge between technical and non-technical stakeholders, explaining technical constraints and tradeoffs in clear terms.
Drive continuous improvement of team process and workflow, using data such as sprint velocity and turnaround times to identify where the studio can work better.

Requirements

3-5 years of project or program management experience required, including a minimum of two years managing agile software, DevOps, or pipeline teams.
Demonstrated technical experience, such as a background in software or tools development, pipeline, build engineering, or DevOps, sufficient to understand architecture, workflows, and technical tradeoffs.
Understanding of production pipelines for linear film work (for example VFX or animation, asset management, review and approval, and delivery). Familiarity with interactive or real-time pipelines is a plus.
Working proficiency with Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and Perforce.
Experience running agile teams (Scrum, Kanban, or a hybrid), including planning, backlog management, and retrospectives.
Program management experience should include:

Ability to multi-task and manage multiple concurrent projects, usually at different stages of the life cycle
Ability to lead and manage multi-disciplinary teams in a matrix management environment
Understanding of requirements from internal customers and the ability to communicate them to multi-tiered audiences
Ability to negotiate scope, schedule, and resource tradeoffs
Ability to develop program plans with concentration on meeting performance, budget, and schedule goals
Ability to resolve conflicts in a productive manner

Excellent communication skills (both written and oral)
Proven ability to build collaboration among team members
Familiarity with CI/CD and build automation concepts, and an agile or project management certification (such as PMP or CSM), are a plus.