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Technical Development Manager

Technical Development Manager

EA Sports Art is a team of Artists, Tech Artists, Technical Art Directors, Craft Directors, and Managers. We collaborate with our EA Sports game teams to provide concepts, characters, lighting, tech art, vfx, and worlds in partnership with other central teams at EA (such as Animation, Rigging, Capture, and Audio) and external partners. EA Sports Art and Technical Art unite to create incredible characters and the worlds they inhabit. The teams we support include FIFA, NHL, UFC, Madden NFL, NBA, PGA Tour, and College Football. We are a diverse team, unified through collaboration, culture and craft.

We are looking for a Development Manager to partner with and support our Technical Art team.

Role Overview:

At EA, Development Managers coordinate a variety of disciplines including designers, software engineers, artists, QA and other production staff. DMs are the keepers of the project schedule and facilitate the development team’s movement from one project phase to the next while ensuring effective collaboration and communication. DMs report to a Development Director and partner with Producers and Directors to ensure that the project is managed on time, to quality, and within budget.

This Technical Development Manager role specifically focuses on support for our EA Sports Technical Art team in Orlando. The EA Sports Technical Art team combines creativity and imagination with technical expertise and works across three major projects in Orlando: Madden NFL, College Football, and PGA Tour. They are the bridge between artists, engineers and designers responsible for data design and art production workflows.

Role Responsibilities:

Team Building and Management

• Develop EA Sports Technical Art Orlando team members by identifying resourcing needs and providing challenges and opportunities to ensure that all employees reach their potential, in partnership with Technical Art Directors
• Foster working relationships within and beyond the EA Sports Art and Technical Art teams, in close (technical) partnership with Technical Art Directors, to help drive projects to successful completion
• Provide line management to employees across departments within project teams
• Participate in the hiring process for new candidates

Execution

• Institute and assign task goals from defined project goals; achieve project deliverables through managing team at a project level (e.g. Franchise-wide level)
• Mitigate risk for assigned scope in partnership with Technical Art Directors
• Monitor capacity (resource balance) and partner with production to manage scope and quality
• Communicate with project team and coordinate requirements with external partners

Project Management

• Orchestrate sprint planning and retrospectives, promoting best practices for task tracking
• Build overall project schedules (roadmaps) based on individual task estimates for production and communicate progress to stakeholders across projects
• Maintain and own Technical Art projects and backlogs
• Establish a project budget, determine tasks and their resource requirements, and assign tasks to team resources

Role Requirements:

• 3+ years project management or team leadership experience
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience within a technical domain
• Knowledge of different project management methodologies such as Waterfall and Agile in a software development setting
• Familiarity with using JIRA as project management tool
• Experience managing outsourcing teams a plus