Technical Program Director

About Us

At Cast & Crew, we’ve empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands - Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools. The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater. We are a production’s best ally every step of the way. #OneCastOneCrew

This role will lead the technical implementation of complex strategic initiatives that cross multiple product, engineering, and data teams. Key initiatives of focus will be Slate and possibly Payroll Services Automation and TTC Stabilization.
Summary

Cast & Crew runs a portfolio of high-priority, multi-faceted engineering initiatives that cut across product, engineering, infrastructure, and business operations teams — the kind of programs where a missed dependency or a late escalation can ripple into a missed deliverable. The Technical Program Director (TPD) is accountable for the delivery rigor of these programs: keeping scope, timeline, and budget under control; keeping information flowing across contributing teams and up to executive stakeholders; and surfacing and resolving risks before they threaten the delivery schedule.

This is explicitly not a product management role. The TPD does not own product vision, roadmap prioritization, or feature requirements. Instead, the TPD partners with Product, Engineering leadership, and workstream owners to instill the program discipline — planning, sequencing, dependency management, and escalation — that lets those teams execute against a shared plan with confidence. Given the visibility of the initiatives in scope, this role reports directly to the CTO and carries executive-level exposure from day one.
What You'll Own
Program Governance & Delivery Rigor

- Establish and maintain scope, schedule, and budget baselines for each assigned program, and maintain a single source of truth for status across contributing teams.

- Build and maintain integrated program plans and dependency maps across engineering, product, QA, data, and operations workstreams to sequence work realistically and expose critical-path risk early.

- Run the standard program-management cadence (RAID logs, steering committees, change-control processes, milestone gates) proportional to program complexity — without adding process for its own sake.

- Track burn against budget and forecast variance early enough for leadership to act on it, not just report it after the fact.

Cross-Team & Executive Communication

- Own the communication rhythm — status reports, steering committee updates, and working sessions — that keep engineering, product, and business stakeholders aligned on status, decisions, and near-term priorities.

- Keep updates to the CTO and other executive stakeholders clear, honest, and actionable at every altitude — the same update landing as technical detail for an engineer, a risk-and-tradeoff summary for a VP, and a business-impact headline for the CEO.

- Act as the connective tissue between teams that don't naturally talk to each other, so decisions get made once instead of re-litigated in five different meetings.

Risk, Issue & Blocker Management

- Identify risks and blockers proactively — before they become schedule or budget impacts — and drive them to resolution or a documented mitigation plan.

- Escalate clearly and with the right urgency: know when a blocker needs a Teams/Slack message, when it needs a leadership decision, and when it needs the CTO in the room.

- Chase down cross-team dependencies across engineering, infrastructure, vendor, and third-party dependencies before they stall a workstream.

Budget, Resourcing & Vendo