The posting
At Big Spaceship, we're explorers, not settlers. We partner with ambitious brands ready to venture into new territory, push creative boundaries, and lead rather than follow.
We're a full-service creative shop built for brands that want to break new ground. Our diverse team of entrepreneurial spirits, creative minds, and makers brings bold ideas to life for some of the world's most innovative and culturally connected brands. If you thrive on exploration, creative risk-taking, and charting new paths, you belong here.
We are looking for a NY-based Program Director to lead the delivery, operations, and financial management of a large-scale, fast-moving client account.
This is a massive account structured across multiple pods, and this person will sit across the entire program — overseeing the pods and senior-level program management while remaining close enough to the work to understand what is happening day to day. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable in the weeds and operating at a high strategic level.
This is an exceptionally high-volume environment with lightning-fast social work and constant production, so we are looking for a true systems thinker who knows how to create structure, efficiency, and visibility across a complex account.
The Program Director will be responsible for building and optimizing the operating systems that allow the account to scale — from workflows and resourcing models to financial tracking, staffing plans, and emerging AI-enabled processes. A major focus will be identifying opportunities to optimize workflows and thoughtfully leverage AI to create smarter, faster, and more efficient ways of working.
Strong financial and commercial management experience is essential. This person must be highly experienced in scoping work, writing SOWs, developing staffing plans, managing budgets, tracking invoices and revenue, monitoring burn rates, and understanding financial performance across multiple levels of an account.
Roles + Responsibilities
- Oversee program management across a large, multi-pod account, creating connectivity, consistency, and operational excellence across all workstreams.
- Lead senior-level program management while staying closely connected to day-to-day project activity, deliverables, risks, and priorities.
- Design, implement, and continuously optimize large-scale operating systems, workflows, processes, and ways of working across the account.
- Identify opportunities to incorporate AI and emerging tools into agency workflows, helping teams work smarter, faster, and more efficiently while maintaining quality.
- Manage an extremely high-volume, fast-paced social and content ecosystem with constant production and rapidly shifting priorities.
- Collaborate across Account, Strategy, Creative, Social, Studio, Production, Analytics, Finance, and other disciplines to create the most effective workflows based on scope and deliverables.
- Maintain a strong understanding of the client's business needs, priorities, content requirements, and overall program objectives.
- Own the development of large-scale and complex scopes of work and SOWs, from initial draft through final approval.
- Develop detailed staffing plans and resource models based on scope, workload, timelines, team structure, and financial targets.
- Coach and oversee project/program managers in developing smaller scopes, estimates, staffing plans, timelines, and budgets.
- Build project and program plans with a strong understanding of internal resources, third-party capabilities, time requirements, and business objectives.
- Own and manage the financial health of the program, including budgets, revenue, invoice tracking, burn rates, forecasting, reconciliation, staffing costs, and scope performance.
- Create program-level financial models that accurately represent current performance and future scenarios and use those models to inform decisions.
- Monitor financial performance across pods and workstreams, identifying risks or inconsistencies early and developing mitigation plans.
- Monitor and calculate the financial impact of scope creep, timeline shifts, staffing changes, and slippages, escalating and addressing issues in real time.
- Keep clients and internal teams aligned against project milestones and clearly flag SOW and financial implications when milestones or deliverables are at risk.
- Ensure sold work is appropriately staffed and delivered against the agreed scope, timeline, budget, and client expectations.
- Lead estimates and facilitate approvals from clients, internal teams, production partners, and vendors.
- Partner closely with Production and Finance around POs, invoices, revenue tracking, reconciliation, and overall financial reporting.
- Forecast resource needs across the program and ensure the appropriate talent is available to meet objectives.
- Identify when freelance or additional resources are required, evaluate rates against available budgets, and support contracting and onboarding.
- Oversee project teams to ensure work is delivered on time, on budget, and at the expected level of quality.
- Establish clear systems for project documentation, status reporting, timelines, dependencies, approvals, and risk management.
- Create visibility across multiple pods so leadership can quickly understand what is on track, what is at risk, where teams are over/under capacity, and where financial intervention may be required.
- Build strong relationships with agency discipline leads and serve as a central operational partner across the account.
- Own and evolve agency processes, understanding when established processes should be followed and when they should be adapted to meet the needs of a fast-moving account.
- Use data to identify inefficiencies, make decisions, and continuously improve account operations.
- Anticipate obstacles, risks, and business disruptions and develop solutions before they impact delivery.
- Think several steps ahead, anticipating likely outcomes, risks, resource needs, and financial implications.
- Drive mitigation strategies in senior-level conversations with internal and external stakeholders.
- Lead teams through ambiguity and change while maintaining clarity, accountability, and momentum.
- Build consensus across disciplines and align project teams and clients around a shared vision and path forward.
- Mentor and develop Program and Project Management talent, creating clear standards and strong operating practices across the team.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience within a creative agency environment in Program Management, Project Management, or integrated delivery leadership.
- Significant experience overseeing large-scale, complex accounts with multiple pods, workstreams, and interconnected teams.
- Demonstrated experience managing high-volume social/content accounts with rapid timelines and constant production.
- Must have deep, hands-on experience scoping work, writing SOWs, creating estimates, and building staffing plans.
- Strong commercial and financial acumen with extensive experience managing multi-million-dollar engagements, budgets, burn rates, revenue, invoicing, forecasting, reconciliation, and scope performance.
- Experience managing engagements and deliverables ranging from $500K to $10M+.
- Proven ability to create and implement operating systems and workflows at scale, not simply manage individual projects within an existing process.
- A true systems thinker who can identify inefficiencies and build scalable solutions across people, process, technology, and financial operations.
- Strong understanding of AI and emerging tools, with an interest in finding practical ways to integrate AI into workflows and improve operational efficiency.
- Ability to operate simultaneously at the 30,000-foot level and deep within the details of the work.
- Extensive experience structuring and managing multi-year client engagements with parallel and interconnected project tracks.
- Strong understanding of resource planning, forecasting, utilization, and staffing.
- Experience managing cross-disciplinary teams across Creative, Account, Strategy, Social, Production, Studio, Analytics, and Finance.
- Experience executing work that adheres to platform guidelines, legal considerations, advertising regulations, and industry best practices.
- Strong Excel and Google Sheets skills and comfort working deeply within financial and operational data.
- Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate complex operational and financial information clearly.
- Experienced mentor and people leader who can set standards while developing the talent of those around them.
- Highly motivated, adaptable, solutions-oriented, and comfortable operating in an extremely fast-paced environment.
- Ability to work independently while also serving as a collaborative leader across a large integrated team.
- NY-based.
Benefits
The salary band for this role is $150,000-170,000. Where a prospective new hire's base salary will fall within this band depends on several factors including their qualifications and experience, the skill level required in the role, market rates, and the salaries of existing crew members at Big Spaceship within the same role to maintain equity.
