Technical Program Manager

Job description

DESCRIPTION

This opportunity is for a Technical Program Manager (TPM) of Software Development to join the Mobile Apps teams to help facilitate and drive the successful coordination and efficient releases across all our Mobile platforms. These teams create and power Audible's Applications on various platforms including but not limited to Android, iOS and Amazon Kindle devices. In this role, you will partner with the Mobile Apps Product and Technology Leaders and teams to coordinate and optimize the release and communication processes across the Audible organization. Success in this role will involve a sharp focus on efficient and timely communication, proactive coordination, a strong desire to learn and a passion for removing inefficiencies and miscommunications.

We are embarking on a mission to reshape the fundamental experiences and delight our customers and drive a strong engineering culture. It's our responsibility to push Audible into new places; wherever our customers are listening. Achieving this vision means expanding and strengthening our development process and leveraging new technologies to deliver native applications. You will help us constantly drive to improve processes and tools and raise the bar for our teams and ultimately allow us to release higher quality software faster to our customers. Success means we lay the foundation for continued expansion of our company without disrupting an already tremendously successful and much-loved product.

HOW DOES AMAZON FIT IN?
We're a part of Amazon: they are our parent company and it's a great partnership. You'll get to play with Amazon's technologies, but it doesn't stop there. Audible is built on a strong foundation of Amazon technology and you'll have insight into the inner workings of the world's leading ecommerce experience.

If you are excited to own and solve problems, work with a creative dynamic team, fail fast in a supportive environment while growing your career and working on market leading Applications that support millions of customers worldwide, we want to hear from you.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
· Communicate project risks, progress, launches and retrospectives across all stakeholders and teams – consistently and transparently.
· Interface and communicate with Development and QA teams, Product Managers and Customer support teams on a daily basis
· Build and maintain the a coordinated release calendar and communicate release details and schedules to the Business as required
· Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews
· Develops scripts and automation tools used to build, integrate, and deploy software releases to various platforms
· Work with development teams and Product managers to develop release notes and communicate changes/scope included in each release/build
· Act as point person/communication hub for future release plans and any changes required
· Facilitate triage sessions with Product/QA/development teams to manage issues/bugs and ensure owners and priority assignments are made, and escalates major blockers to the appropriate audience when required
· Handle deployment of Alpha builds to platform Apps stores (e.g. Google Play, Apple Store, Samsung Store, Amazon Store)
· Facilitate deployment of internal and external Beta releases when required and ensures all captured feedback is collected efficiently and communicated successfully back to internal teams
· Review release metrics and proactively monitors trends or abnormalities that may arise
· Maintain and adhere to a vetted Launch/Go-live checklist for any build or release deployed to QA, Beta, or Production environments
· Work with QA and other internal UAT teams to facilitate regression test cycles before determining release Customer launch feasibility
· Drive visibility and transparency of dates, upcoming milestones and release dates throughout the Sprint development process
· Monitor Apps Production Analytics dashboards to ensure roll-outs and ramp-ups are happening as expected and no abnormalities in crashes or install failures
· Build, update and monitor a release dashboard, and historical release notes on wiki page.
· Work with QA and Development teams to reduce release cycle times
· Define and drive best-of-class tooling and automation to optimize build, release management and deployment processes
· Build relationships with partner groups in Audible and Amazon and leverage those relationships to integrate your team's priorities within Amazon teams and understand how Amazon's projects impact our own work in this highly decentralized organization

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field
· 5+ years experience of software development and deployment of distributed multi-tier applications.
· 2+ years experience managing agile software projects
· Ability to navigate an ambiguous environment in which change is the only constant.
· Demonstrated ability to manage and coordinate across multiple groups and locales, with strong, clear verbal and written communication skills
· Demonstrated working knowledge in using collaboration and work management tools such as JIRA/Confluence or comparable wiki/collaboration tools.
· Demonstrated customer obsession and excellent expectation-management abilities.
· Superior written and verbal communication skills.
· Ability to diplomatically disagree and align when dealing with different stakeholders.
· Delivery-oriented and with a bias for our customers.
· 2-6 years of previous release and/or project management experience (Solid understanding of project management principles preferred)
· Advanced knowledge of software development life-cycle
· Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional work teams toward task completion
· Demonstrated effective leadership and analytical skills
· Solid interpersonal skills; able to effectively organize & communicate with cross-functional teams.