Senior Program Manager, Applied Science | Irvine, CA

Senior Program Manager, Applied Science | Irvine, CA

For more than three decades, Blizzard has embraced technological evolution not for its own sake, but to better serve our values, empower our teams, and enhance the experiences we deliver. We continue to explore cutting edge technologies that support game development and production. Our central applied science and machine-learning teams drive the development of internal tools and platforms. We are looking for a Senior Program Manager to support evaluation, adoption, and ongoing development of innovative technologies, tools, and platforms that are used in connection with video game development and production.

The role will partner with applied scientists, machine learning engineers, and stakeholders across the business to coordinate evaluations, manage execution, and guide the development of internal tools and platforms. The ideal candidate brings strong operational rigor, technical fluency in applied science, and product judgment in guiding technology adoption and the evolution of internal tools and platforms.

This role offers a flexible hybrid work week, with a mix of remote and on-site days. While hybrid is the standard arrangement, you're also welcome to work on-site full-time if you prefer. Our primary studio location is in Irvine, California.

Responsibilities

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:

• Drive cross-functional planning and execution for the evaluation, adoption, and development of internal platforms and external technologies utilized in game development and production.
• Partner with applied scientists, engineering, and business stakeholders to translate team needs into clear requirements, evaluation plans, and adoption strategies.
• Help guide the direction and prioritization for internal tools and platforms by identifying high-value use cases, capability gaps, and opportunities.
• Manage stakeholder alignment, readiness, communications, and risk management to support successful rollout and adoption across teams.
• Track outcomes, user feedback, success metrics, and key dependencies to inform recommendations, platform direction, and guide scaled rollout.

Minimum Requirements

• 8+ years of program management experience supporting cross-functional technical initiatives, platforms, tools, and internal systems.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, statistics, or related domain.
• Strong understanding of innovative technologies and tools, including LLM-based applications, context retrieval patterns, tool integrations, agentic systems, and automation.
• Ability to identify team needs, translate them into requirements, and help guide the direction of internal tools and platforms.
• Technical fluency to work effectively with applied scientists, machine learning engineers on requests, integrations, evaluation frameworks, and platform capabilities.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with cross-functional teams.

Pluses

• Experience partnering closely with engineering, applied science, or machine learning teams to shape internal capabilities, prioritize improvements, and support iterative development of tools and platforms.
• Experience supporting teams in game development or production environment.
• Experience driving thoughtful evaluation and adoption of new technologies in large organizations.
• Familiarity with assessing solutions across quality, cost, latency, safety, reliability, and usability.
• Familiarity with evaluating machine learning platforms, multimodal tools, and automation solutions.
• Master's degree in engineering.

Our World

Activision Blizzard, Inc., is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, Candy Crush™ and Bubble Witch™. Our combined entertainment network delights hundreds of millions of monthly active users in 196 countries, making us the…