Senior Technical Product Manager, Applied AI

CREATIVITY IS OUR SUPERPOWER.  It’s our heritage and it’s also our future. Because we don’t just make toys. We create innovative products and experiences that inspire fans, entertain audiences and develop children through play. Mattel is at its best when every member of our team feels respected, included, and heard—when everyone can show up as themselves and do their best work every day. We value and share an infinite range of ideas and voices that evolve and broaden our perspectives with a reach that extends into all our brands, partners, and suppliers. The Team: The Opportunity:  Mattel Digital Studios (MDS) is a cross-functional division that leverages digital innovation to amplify Mattel’s iconic brands, expanding into digital gaming, interactive experiences, and emerging technologies. The MDS Tech organization serves as the technical foundation across this portfolio, building scalable systems, tools, and platforms that enable product teams to move quickly and deliver high-quality digital experiences. Working across multiple products and partners, the team focuses on unlocking the value of AI, data, and modern development frameworks to power personalization, content creation, and next-generation play experiences.  As part of this ecosystem, the Applied AI function sits at the intersection of product innovation and technical execution—unlocking new capabilities across creative workflows, internal tooling, and development pipelines.  What Your Impact Will Be:  As a Senior Technical Product Manager, Applied AI, you will define, build, and scale AI-powered tools, workflows, and decision-support systems across Mattel Digital Studios. You will be accountable for identifying friction in cross-functional workflows — process misalignment, communication overhead, unreliable data, and stretched team bandwidth — and for translating that friction into a prioritized portfolio of AI solutions that measurably move the business.  You will manage a portfolio framed in three buckets — Quick Wins, Efficiency Gains, and Strategic Bets — with the strongest opportunities progressing from proof-of-concept into strategic pilot and broader MDS rollout. The scope spans workflow automation, internal tooling, creative and content-generation tools, and decision-support systems tied to real operational use cases.  Unlike traditional product roles, this position requires hands-on technical execution. You will actively build prototypes, experiment with AI models and APIs, and develop working solutions; but success goes beyond prototyping — it is seeing opportunities through productization, rollout, stakeholder alignment, team enablement, and repeatability across disciplines. You will partner with MDS leadership and the Product, Engineering, Operations, and Creative teams, bringing external vendors where buying beats building.  This role is critical in ensuring that AI efforts are grounded in real business and user value, avoiding both strategy without execution and technology without clear application. You will also help flag and manage adoption risk—data quality, model accuracy and reliability, brand and creative integrity, and appropriate guardrails—partnering with the Office of AI and other governance stakeholders as needed.  This role reports to the MDS Technical Director and works cross-functionally across MDS.  Do you or someone you know have a passion to create products that inspire, entertain, and delight fans of all ages?  Join us to create the future of play.  What We’re Looking For: Portfolio & Pain-Point Ownership  Own the applied AI roadmap from pitch to production — with direction and buy-in from MDS leadership, balancing speed, experimentation, and long-term value creation.  Identify and surface use cases and friction—assessing feasibility and scalability, translating them into high-impact AI opportunities.  Manage the opportunity portfolio—graduating the strongest proofs-of-concept into strategic pilots and broader MDS rollout.  Translate business needs into AI-powered tools, workflow automations, and decision-support solutions, defining clear requirements, success metrics, adoption targets, and iteration plans Experiment, Innovate & Build  Continuously explore emerging AI capabilities and evaluate their application for internal tools, workflows, and content pipelines; apply them where operational impact, not novelty, justifies the work.  Build prototypes, lightweight applications, automations, and decision-support tools. Work hands-on, using modern AI platforms — LLM APIs, multimodal models, agent frameworks, orchestration tools, and evaluation harnesses.  Rapidly test and iterate on new ideas with a focus on measurable operational impact.  Partner with engineering, platform, and external vendors to productize, harden, and scale successful prototypes—owning build-vs-buy judgment and seeing opportunities through to live deployment.  Cross-Functional Enablement  Act as a bridge between MDS leadership, Product, Engineering, Operations, and Creative teams to identify and unlock AI opportunities within internal workflows and pipelines.  Secure leadership buy-in, drive alignment across stakeholders on priorities, and translate ambition into crisp execution plans with owners, timelines, and measurable outcomes.  Enable teams through reusable tools, workflow patterns, playbooks, and training that make adoption repeatable across disciplines—not one-off wins.  Collaborate with external partners (e.g., OpenAI) to accelerate internal capability building, and spearhead vendor evaluation and integration.  Governance, Responsible Use & Measurable Impact  Manage adoption risks—data quality, compliance, hallucinations, over-reliance, brand and creative integrity—setting guardrails with the Office of AI and consulting with legal and privacy teams.  Define success metrics per opportunity—productivity, quality, cost, effectiveness—and report portfolio impact on a re