Donald Steever

Technical Program Management and Technical Product Operations Leader with a track record of modernizing enterprise rights architecture, dismantling legacy data debt, and scaling high-throughput ingestion ecosystems. Proven bridge between software engineering units and operational stakeholders—defining Agile product requirements, governing User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and executing staging-to-production deployment gates across matrixed media organizations. Expert in translating complex distribution requirements and disparate metadata registers into scalable schemas, recovering thousands of operational hours, and securing 100% compliance across high-volume distribution lifecycles.

Systems Advisor & Industry Consultant at BMI ADVISORY GROUP (2026-01 – Present)

• Inter-Studio System Architecture: Scoped decoupled data architecture specifications and standardized interoperable metadata schemas across major studio networks (Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery) to eliminate cascading corruption during bulk database transactions.
• Access Governance & Fault Isolation: Designed functional requirements for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to isolate external vendor permissions; engineered field-level hyperlinked error-tracking specifications to eliminate ingestion validation friction.
• Platform Modernization Advisory: Formulated data-intake criteria to capture total catalog duration and performance metrics, bypassing legacy data truncation barriers to support high-scale distribution pipelines.

Director of Operations & Platform Transition Lead at PARAMOUNT GLOBAL (Formerly CBS Corporation) (2011-01 – 2025-12)

• SDLC Release Governance & Technical Product Ownership: Governed UAT and feature release gates for proprietary enterprise media databases across recurring deployment schedules, translating operational friction into structured Jira user stories for engineering sprints supporting 200+ global active accounts.
• Incident Escalation & Telemetry Layer: Engineered a two-tier operational triage architecture via Slack to isolate frontend input anomalies from backend server faults, resolving localized incidents within a strict 30-to-60 minute SLA before triggering engineering escalation paths.
• Platform Modernization & Backlog Elimination: Partnered with software engineering to design and deploy internal "Bulk Mutation" functionality within proprietary databases, eliminating an inherited 3-year metadata backlog in under 6 months.
• High-Throughput Distribution Governance: Governed distribution lifecycle operations for an 87.5-hour weekly network broadcast portfolio, enforcing a 7-day post-lock operational compliance window to maintain a 100% record of zero downstream PRO distribution compliance penalties.
• Legacy Infrastructure Dismantling: Directed the end-of-lifecycle migration of a 21-year historical archive (1999–2020) containing thousands of unstructured assets out of fragile legacy network storage into iManage cloud architecture, recovering 5,000+ hours of annual productivity.
• Forensic Royalty Assurance Audit: Engineered a forensic metadata reconciliation protocol cross-referencing daily broadcast logs against external settlement engines, resolving multi-year validation anomalies to recover $2.0M in uncollected performance royalties.
• Cross-Industry Systems Standardization: Represented enterprise broadcast operations on a 15-year cross-industry development advisory board alongside Sony Telepictures, Disney, and 20th Century Fox, co-developing and testing RapidCue to establish the direct-to-PRO distribution standard.

Operations Specialist / Workflow Coordinator at CBS CORPORATION (1999-01 – 2011-12)

• Extracted and modeled multi-year historical usage data across broadcast programming tranches to defend multi-million-dollar operating budgets during blanket license negotiations.
• Supervised daily regional broadcast log operations and metadata workflows for flagship national syndication and news programs, maintaining daily regulatory compliance.

Bachelor of Arts in Communications (Radio/TV/Film) – Rowan University