At ArenaNet, we’ve always believed that games are art. They have the power to communicate ideas and tell stories. They can change the way we think, reflect our cultures, and move us. As the developer of the award-winning Guild Wars game series, we’re proud to share our passion for the online worlds we’ve created with over 11 million players worldwide.
ArenaNet develops and publishes games for every kind of person, which means our games need to be built by every kind of person. We believe the best experiences come from working together, celebrating differences, and helping each of our team members shine.
As an Advanced Program Manager, you will support the creation of static and dynamic art assets, animations, and visual effects by optimizing Art workflows, pipelines, and development methodologies for in-development games. You will partner with Technical Art and Engineering teams to prioritize art tool extensibility solutions and improve overall game performance to the delight of our player base. You will be instrumental in establishing, optimizing, and automating data collection and analysis mechanisms to provide meaningful insights into art development throughput and player behavior. By leveraging data trends and insights, you'll help the studio identify and replicate best practices, and understand which art assets are truly delighting our player base.
What You’ll Do
- Develop and execute program management mechanisms to scale and optimize art development processes, increasing production efficiency, iteration speed, game stability, and art quality.
- Plan, organize, manage, and execute complex projects across technical and creative art teams, documenting goals, risks, roadmaps, schedules, and performance metrics.
- Support art teams in tracking requests, dependency mapping, resource allocation, and detailed scope management across long timespans.
- Keep the pipeline full of requests to ensure efficient use of art team resources
- Create and maintain reports to improve throughput and drive development progress.
- Collaborate with design, narrative, outsourcing, cinematics, marketing, and programming to scope cross-functional projects, budget resources, create schedules, and meet critical milestones.
- Nurture relationships across teams to align senior stakeholders on joint goals.
- Monitor change requests and escalate when significant changes to project scope occur, communicating changes to impacted stakeholders.
- Identify Risks and develop mitigation strategies, partnering with production peers to remove blocking issues and provide visibility to affected teams and stakeholders.
- Jira admin support for multiple projects
- Creates, documents, and communicates new/updated programs, policies, processes, and workflows.
What You’ll Need to be Successful
- Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline.
- 8+ years of Program Management / Project Management experience required.
- 5+ years of experience leading cross-functional teams to deliver products and projects on tight deadlines.
- 3+ years of experience as a program manager using both Agile and Waterfall game development methodologies.
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams and communicate with senior leadership.
- Senior level experience with game production in AAA game development or similar field in entertainment, ideally with deep knowledge of Art pipelines and workflows.
- Experience disambiguating complicated problem domains while navigating frequent changes to scope or success criteria, and skilled at guiding others through the same.
- Ability to think strategically and execute methodically, leveraging both quantitative and qualitative analytical thinking skills.
- High attention to detail including proven ability to manage multiple, competing priorities simultaneously.
- Ability to create and implement appropriate production processes customized to individual team needs while also synchronizing with business intelligence mechanisms.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills combined with an ability to solve problems independently.
- Experience working with Jira.
- Sound business judgment and familiarity with budget ownership.
- Experience working with large, cross-disciplined teams.
This is a hybrid position based out of our Bellevue, WA office.
Please note that the pay range listed in this job posting reflects the full salary range for this position. While we provide this range to offer transparency, our target hiring range typically falls between the minimum and the midpoint, allowing for growth potential within the role.
Total compensation is salary plus an annual bonus potential. When determining an offer amount, many things are taken into consideration such as qualifications, experience, internal equity and work location. We strive to provide competitive and equitable compensation packages to all our employees.
This role is also eligible for medical, dental, vision and life insurance, short and long term disability, 401(k), flexible and dependent care spending accounts, PTO, paid holidays and parental leave.
Don’t meet every single requirement on this job post? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At ArenaNet, we believe diversity in culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and backgrounds make us a better team – we celebrate it. So, if you’re excited about this role, but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification listed, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
