Senior Technical Project Manager, AI product

Company description

Saatchi & Saatchi is an advertising agency with the belief that creativity, data, media and technology should all work together, and we use that to influence human behavior and drive success for clients. S&S is one of the world’s largest agency networks with 114 offices and more than 6000 employees globally.

Here in our Toronto office we work with some of the countries most valued brands including Toyota, Buckley’s, and Children’s Advil, as well as several under the Mondelez banner (Crispers, Oreo, and Chips Ahoy just to name a few). We’re an award winning agency in both creativity and effectiveness, so it’s really important for us here to convert that innovation and the great ideas into real tangible business results for the organization.

Saatchi & Saatchi is seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager for an innovative AI platform initiative starting immediately. We are looking for someone with a producer's mindset — the instincts of a VFX producer, game producer, or hands‑on product owner — paired with strong technical fluency, who thrives in a fast‑paced environment.

Years of experience are flexible; mindset matters more than credentials. You translate between engineering, design, business, and clients, and you build and carry the mental model of what the platform is, what it needs next, and how every piece relates. You operate calmly in a fast‑moving multi‑stakeholder environment that spans agencies, holding‑company partners, and global Publicis teams.

• Hold and maintain the technical mental model of the platform — what is built, what is being built, what is needed, and how every component relates to the broader program — and act as a trusted translator between engineering, design, leadership, and clients.
• Provide technical thought leadership and partner with engineering and architecture on what the product actually needs next, not just what is on the backlog.
• Plan, sequence, and drive delivery across multiple concurrent work streams (frontend, backend, agentic, data, infra) and across multiple environments and live release events.
• Run a lightweight, high‑signal agile cadence — standups, planning, retros — that respects engineering focus time and produces decisions, not status theatre.
• Track and communicate scope, dependencies, risk, and progress across Saatchi, Moov AI, Publicis NA, and global Publicis stakeholders.
• Act as the primary point of coordination for technical readiness around live events (Builder Nights, integration milestones, client demos), driving pre‑event run‑throughs and post‑event retros.
• Identify scope creep, conflicting priorities, and unowned work early — and either resolve them, escalate them, or absorb the coordination cost so engineering can keep shipping.
• Maintain just‑enough living documentation (system overviews, decision logs, release notes) so the team’s mental model can survive a hire, a departure, or a vacation.
• Partner with the existing interim technical PM (currently Kamaal) on a deliberate knowledge‑transfer plan so this role builds redundancy on a critical single point of failure.
• Represent the technical reality of the program in client and leadership conversations — translating engineering trade‑offs into language that lands.

• Demonstrated track record running complex technical programs end‑to‑end — software platforms, AI/ML products, large web implementations, complex digital productions, or equivalent. Years are flexible; depth and judgement are not.
• Strong technical fluency: you can sit in an architecture conversation about microservices, APIs, cloud infrastructure, or LLM/agent systems and add real value, not just take notes.
• Experience coordinating cross‑functional delivery across engineering, design, QA, data, infra, and external vendors or partners.
• Comfortable working in agile, hybrid‑agile, or producer‑led delivery models, and choosing the right cadence for the moment.
• Strong stakeholder management across technical and non‑technical audiences — clients, executives, engineers, designers, holding‑company partners.
• Hands‑on with modern collaboration and PM tooling (Jira, Confluence, Loop / Notion, Miro / Fig…