Director, Technical Program Manager
Rover.com
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: Seattle • Washington • United States
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Salary
💰 $188,330 - $250,479 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Provide program leadership and execution guidance for high-impact, cross-functional initiatives, stepping in directly when appropriate while ensuring work is effectively driven by the right roles.
- Evolve how Rover plans, sequences, and delivers complex, cross-functional technical initiatives.
- Support alignment across teams by anticipating and addressing dependencies, risks, tradeoffs, and sequencing challenges in ambiguous environments.
- Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and Data leaders to clarify ownership, scope, milestones, success metrics, and tradeoffs for major initiatives.
- Serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders, helping teams navigate ambiguity and make informed execution decisions across organizational boundaries.
- Build, manage, and mentor a small team of Technical Program Managers, coaching them on execution rigor, judgment, and cross-functional influence.
- Lead and develop the TPM function, establishing shared expectations, patterns, and practices that strengthen execution consistency and effectiveness over time.
- Provide data-driven visibility into execution health to enable faster decision-making, surface tradeoffs, and proactively address risks with senior leaders and executives.
- Define and use execution and program-level metrics to preserve strong outcomes while increasing consistency and leverage across initiatives.
- Serve as a trusted technical thought partner, bringing deep understanding of Rover’s systems, platforms, and architecture to planning and execution discussions.
- Ensure initiatives appropriately account for system design, reliability, security, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
- Drive a culture of accountability, ownership, and cross-functional trust that supports effective execution and strong collaboration across teams.
Requirements
- 15+ years of experience leading large-scale technical programs in complex engineering environments.
- Experience defining, shaping, and scaling a Technical Program Management function, including organizational structure, role definitions, engagement models with cross-functional partners, and the evolution of TPM practices over time.
- Proven success leading highly complex, cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple teams and domains, often over multiple quarters, where execution decisions had clear customer or business impact.
- Strong technical foundation with the ability to understand and reason about complex, interconnected systems and architectures, including large, customer-facing platforms with reliability, scalability, and performance considerations.
- Excellent communication and influence skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
- Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous environments.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- 401k match
- Long-term incentive plan with a company performance-based cash payout
- Flexible PTO
- Competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Commuter benefits
- Bring your dog to work (and unlimited puppy time)
- Pet benefits, including $1000 toward adopting your first dog or cat
- Stocked fridges, coffee, soda, and lots of treats (for humans and dogs) and free catered lunches monthly
- Regular team activities performed in-person and virtually
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
Technical Program Managementprogram-level metricsexecution healthsystem designreliabilityscalabilityperformance considerationscross-functional initiativescomplex engineering environmentscustomer-facing platforms
Soft Skills
leadershipcommunicationinfluencementoringcollaborationjudgmentaccountabilitytrustproblem-solvingadaptability