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.
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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.
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Provide technical thought leadership and partner with engineering and architecture on what the product actually needs next, not just what is on the backlog.
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Plan, sequence, and drive delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams (frontend, backend, agentic, data, infra) and across multiple environments and live release events.
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Run a lightweight, high-signal agile cadence — standups, planning, retros — that respects engineering focus time and produces decisions, not status theatre.
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Track and communicate scope, dependencies, risk, and progress across Saatchi, Moov AI, Publicis NA, and global Publicis stakeholders.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Represent the technical reality of the program in client and leadership conversations — translating engineering trade-offs into language that lands.
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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.
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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.
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Experience coordinating cross-functional delivery across engineering, design, QA, data, infra, and external vendors or partners.
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Comfortable working in agile, hybrid-agile, or producer-led delivery models, and choosing the right cadence for the moment.
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Strong stakeholder management across technical and non-technical audiences — clients, executives, engineers, designers, holding-company partners.
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Hands-on with modern collaboration and PM tooling (Jira, Confluence, Loop / Notion, Miro / FigJam, GitHub, Slack / Teams).
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Working understanding of modern cloud-native platforms, CI/CD, and AI/LLM-enabled products — enough to ask the right questions and challenge soft answers.
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Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to summarize a chaotic situation into a clear next-action paragraph.
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Located in or willing to work Toronto hours; hybrid presence expected for client and team moments.
Required Soft Skills
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Producer instincts — you treat shipping as the goal, you protect the team from churn, and you measure success by what got delivered.
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Pattern-recognition under noise — you can hold a complex live picture in your head and notice when something is drifting before it breaks.
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Calm under pressure — live events, infrastructure surprises, and stakeholder escalations don't rattle your communication.
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Translator's ear — you can paraphrase engineering accurately to a client and paraphrase client intent accurately to engineering, without losing fidelity.
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Bias to action — you would rather make a reversible call now than hold a meeting to ratify the obvious one.
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Comfortable with chaos and ambiguity, but committed to leaving the program more legible than you found it.
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Generous with credit, direct with concerns, professional in conflict.
Nice to Have
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Prior experience in a Publicis Groupe or other major holding-company agency environment (cultural shorthand transfers fast).
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Background as a VFX producer, game producer, technical product owner, or hands-on technical solutions consultant.
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Experience producing or coordinating live demo / launch events with real users on a non-rehearsable schedule.
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Exposure to AI/LLM-enabled product delivery (agents, RAG, evaluation loops, prompt iteration cycles).
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PMI-ACP, CSM, or comparable agile certification (signal, not a gate).
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Familiarity with GCP / GKE, contract-first integration models, or multi-tenant SaaS delivery patterns.
