Job Description
Job Overview:
Hearst’s corporate Generative AI team is looking for a seasoned Senior Program Manager to orchestrate the planning, delivery, and continuous improvement of next‑generation AI capabilities that power products across Hearst’s global portfolio. Sitting at the nexus of program management, product strategy, and cross-disciplinary enablement, you will translate ambitious AI concepts into robust, scalable solutions—driving alignment among engineers, designers, security, legal, and business stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the end‑to‑end program lifecycle for a portfolio of cross-divisional Generative AI initiatives—from discovery through GA launch and post‑release optimization.
- Build and manage integrated schedules and resource plans, proactively surfacing risks and driving mitigation.
- Coordinate on-shore and off-shore engineering, design, and PM resources, ensuring consistent velocity and quality across time zones.
- Participate in defining product vision and detailed roadmaps for AI products including multi‑agent process automation, secure RAG features, voice & vision interfaces, evaluation tooling, and personalization initiatives.
- Lead requirement elicitation with business units; craft product requirement documentation that balances technical feasibility and business impact.
- Own processes for day-to-day updates and stakeholder communication in partnership with product & engineering leads.
- Conduct competitive and market analysis to inform build‑vs‑buy decisions and upcoming feature bets.
- Steer internal benchmark & proof‑of‑concept tracks to validate new capabilities and tactics.
Minimum Qualifications
- 8+ years managing large‑scale software programs and products.
- Proven ability to partner deeply with senior engineers and autonomously move projects from inception through delivery and maintenance.
- Comfortable discussing generative AI capabilities—including multimodal inputs/outputs, RAG architectures, multi-agent orchestration, prompt optimization, and evaluation metrics—and turning them into actionable plans.
- Naturally inquisitive with a bias for action, able to channel curiosity and practical experimentation into transformative process changes given rapidly evolving SoTA technology and best practices.
- Hands‑on experience with project management workflows and tooling such as Jira, Confluence, Notion, etc. for orchestrating multi‑team backlogs.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication, able to distill complex AI trade‑offs for both technical and non‑technical audiences.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior responsibility for developer platforms or customer features serving broad and diverse audiences (e.g. 250+ internal / 250,000+ external).
- Familiarity with autonomous agent systems (e.g. Computer Use, Operator, OpenAI Agents, multi-agent frameworks like LangGraph/Pydantic AI Agents)
- Experience deploying products in corporate, media, healthcare, transportation, or financial‑services environments with stringent compliance obligations.
In accordance with applicable law, Hearst is required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role if hired in New York City. The reasonable estimate, if hired in New York City, is $170,000 - $210,000. Please note this information is specific to those hired in New York City. If this role is open to candidates outside of New York City, the salary range would be aligned to that specific location. A final decision on the successful candidate’s starting salary will be based on a number of permissible, non-discriminatory factors, including but not limited to skills and experience, training, certifications, and education. Hearst provides a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, 401(k), paid holidays and paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more.
