Program Director

MediaKind; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company in Southampton is seeking a Program Director to lead coordination efforts across its MK.IO portfolio. This role involves managing complex projects, enhancing team communication, and delivering on commitments to stakeholders. The ideal candidate will possess strong systems thinking, communication skills, and the ability to influence teams without direct authority. This position offers a hybrid work environment with competitive salary and ongoing professional development opportunities.

Benefits

Competitive salary and bonus structure

Ongoing training and professional development opportunities

Collaborative and dynamic work environment

Flexible work arrangements, including hybrid work options

Qualifications

• Ability to build a mental model of complex systems.
• Effective in shifting priorities and ambiguity.
• Experience influencing teams without direct authority.
• Strong presentation and collaboration skills for diverse audiences.
• Focused on outcomes and defining processes for delivery.
• Adaptability to changing situations and priorities.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate activities across the MK.IO portfolio.
• Bridge communication across teams and ensure clarity.
• Deliver on commitments to customers and stakeholders.
• Manage significant projects from an end-to-end perspective.
• Collaborate with senior leaders and executives.

Skills

Systems thinking

Communication range

Influence without authority

Delivery orientation

Resilience

Comfort with ambiguity

Job description

Position Overview

We are seeking a technically focused Program Director to coordinate activities across our MK.IO portfolio, reporting to our VP of Engineering. This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to help steer a high-value, high-growth product at a transitional moment in its development lifecycle.

Whether you are early in your career or an established program leader, we are looking for an optimistic and collaborative individual with a track record of doing impossible things. If you think you might fit the bill, we look forward to hearing from you!

About the Team

Working closely with our engineering teams in Southampton and Rennes you will be joining a team of experienced and highly motivated software engineers, who have particular expertise in video technology and cloud infrastructure.

We value curiosity about complex systems (but also in general), the ability to cultivate strong relationships across cultures, and a mindset towards continuous, iterative improvements.

About the Outcomes

This role is about delivering on our commitments - whether those commitments are to customers, to our peers in our product organization, or to ourselves. You will succeed when you bridge communication across teams, eliminate confusion and delays, reduce context switching and reprioritization, and help the team arrive at structure, plan, and deliver on significant projects with an end-to-end perspective. You will be in front of senior leaders and executives and collaborating across the entire MediaKind organization.

Example Projects

The program in question is our MK.IO SaaS platform, on which all MediaKind products have been integrated. We structure work across several domains, including Live and OnDemand video, Streaming Delivery, AI, Backoffice, Advertising, and others. Recent deliveries, completed and ongoing, include key customer migrations across cloud vendors, Multiview technology for both h264 and HEVC encoding, a significant ERP integration and business process overhaul, and the integration of our Live Encoder into our core product.

What You'll Bring

• Systems thinking. You can build a mental model of a complex product and organization. We’ll support you as you develop understanding how video encoding, packaging, CDN, control plane, and cloud infrastructure fit together, and how decisions in one area affect others. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you need to be able to follow technical conversations and ask the right questions.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You’ve operated successfully in environments where the org chart doesn’t tell the whole story, priorities shift, and not every relationship is clean. You don’t need everything to be settled before you can be effective.
• Influence without authority. Much of your impact will come through teams you don’t directly manage. You know how to build trust, find alignment, and drive outcomes through persuasion and clarity rather than control. A track record of educating and growing expertise in others, building trust and consensus, and bringing others along as you effectuate change, is very important to us.
• Communication range. You can present to executives, collaborate with engineering directors, and work through details with individual contributors. You can adjust your approach for each audience without losing substance.
• Delivery orientation. You care about outcomes, and see process as a facilitator of outcomes, not as something to be built for its own sake. Where there are gaps, you’ll help define how we work, changing and creating the playbook. You've shipped complex projects and can point to what you did to make that happen.
• Resilience. Things will change! New priorities, new teams, new constraints. You’re at your best when the situation demands adaptability.

Location

Southampton, Hybrid (1-2 days a week office based)

• Competitive salary and bonus structure
• Ongoing training and professional development opportunities
• Collaborative and dynamic work environment
• Flexible work arrangements, including hybrid work options

Here at MediaKind, we are dedicated to creating an inclusive workplace where we appreciate the unique skills, capabilities and perspectives that our people bring. We believe that diverse teams are better for our employees, customers and our business. Everyone’s identity, background and life experiences add to the MediaKind story and we welcome all.

Our goal is to help increase diversity across the Media Broadcast industry, so we aim to make the recruitment process as accessible as possible. If you’re excited about this position and think you could add value to MediaKind, please apply even if you believe your skills are not a perfect fit for the role. Should you require any reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment process please reach out to the Recruiter to discuss how we can support you.