Director, Organizational Development

Thumbtack • San Francisco, CA

2d • $230,000 - $330,000 • Remote

About The Position

Thumbtack is seeking a Director of Talent & Organizational Development to enhance performance and capability across the company. This role involves building talent systems, leadership practices, and developmental plans to support business scaling. The position reports to the Head of People and will define the long-term strategy for performance management, career architecture, talent and succession planning, leadership development, organizational design, and enterprise change. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring partnership with senior leaders and HRBPs to address high-priority talent and organizational challenges. The Director will balance company-wide strategy with detailed execution, including advising leaders, designing frameworks, building development experiences, and ensuring positive impacts on performance, talent density, and growth paths. Initial priorities include improving performance evaluation, evolving career and talent frameworks, building leadership capabilities for the company's next phase, and establishing a measurement system for these initiatives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience across talent management, organizational development, learning and development, or related disciplines, including 4+ years leading and developing people
• Deep expertise in talent management—including performance, career architecture, talent planning, and succession—along with demonstrated strength in leadership development, organizational effectiveness, and change management
• A track record of personally designing and implementing scalable talent and organizational solutions, with clear evidence of the performance, capability, or business outcomes they produced
• Credibility with senior leaders and the ability to lead through ambiguity, influence without formal authority, and turn complex or sensitive issues into decisions and action
• An AI-first approach to work, including hands-on experience building multi-step workflows and sound judgment about the use of AI in sensitive people processes and decisions
• A player-coach orientation and analytical mindset: comfortable moving between strategy and detailed execution, grounding solutions in adult-learning and talent-management practices, and using data to improve what you build

Responsibilities

• Set and own Thumbtack’s multi-year Talent and Organizational Development strategy, integrating performance management, career architecture, talent and succession planning, leadership development, and change into a focused roadmap with measurable outcomes.
• Evolve how Thumbtack defines, enables, and assesses performance strengthening goal setting, expectations, feedback, calibration, and accountability so high performance is clear, consistent, and differentiated.
• Maintain and evolve the company’s career architecture, including role and level frameworks, capability expectations, and career paths that give employees clarity and support consistent talent decisions.
• Lead talent planning and succession practices that help leaders assess talent, identify critical capability and bench gaps, accelerate high-potential employees, and make deliberate decisions about the organization’s future needs.
• Design scalable development experiences that close meaningful capability gaps, strengthen manager effectiveness, and prepare senior leaders for greater complexity and scope.
• Apply an AI-first approach across the portfolio, building workflows that improve insight, personalization, and scale while helping managers and leaders develop the capabilities needed to lead in an AI-first company.
• Establish an integrated measurement framework for Talent and Organizational Development, using business, talent, and program data to evaluate impact and determine what to scale, change, or stop.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed