Senior Technical Program Manager, Cross-Functional Programs

Rover.com•Seattle, WA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Rover is seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager to join their Technical Program Management team. This role is responsible for owning and executing complex, cross-functional programs that span multiple teams including product, engineering, data, and operations. The TPM will drive alignment across organizational boundaries, bring structured thinking to challenging roadmap problems, and ensure the successful delivery of programs critical to Rover's platform and community experiences. The role requires a strong technical judgment, the ability to provide structure to ambiguous problems, and a proactive approach to decision-making and stakeholder alignment. This is a hybrid position requiring two days per week in the Downtown Seattle Office.

Requirements

8+ years driving complex, cross-functional technical programs, ideally at a marketplace, consumer tech, or SaaS company.
A track record of owning high-complexity, ambiguous programs end to end across multiple domains and stakeholder groups, not a single specialty.
You've taken programs from scoping and strategy through delivery and retrospective in domains you didn't start out knowing, including ones where your first deliverable was a scope that didn't exist before you got there.
A way of working through ambiguous situations rather than a tolerance for them: orienting quickly on incomplete or conflicting information, separating what's genuinely unknown from what simply hasn't been asked, and breaking a shapeless problem into parts people can start on before the full picture exists.
High agency in driving decisions rather than documenting them, and stellar stakeholder alignment across organizational lines, including with senior leadership.
You can hold a room of partners with competing incentives, know when to make the recommendation yourself and when to find the person who owns the call, and leave with a shared plan.
Judgment under uncertainty, and the ability to explain it: when to force a decision and when to wait, when to escalate and when to absorb the risk yourself, when to hold the line on scope and when to let it move.
You can point to calls you got right and calls you'd make differently now.
The technical acumen to be a true peer to engineering: reading a dependency chain, evaluating trade-offs without needing full translation, debating technical approaches, and finding where the real sequencing risk lives, where architectural patterns need to evolve, or where we're choosing one-way doors.
Strong core program management craft: standing up a plan and a status process, running a decision-making cadence, using metrics to surface risk early, show progress, and tell whether a program delivered after it shipped, and identifying what's missing in planning and execution before it costs the program.
You're as comfortable speaking technically as non-technically, and can bridge between the two.
A habit of pushing AI tools further in your work: automating repetitive tasks like status reporting or risk tracking, building custom workflows, or creating frameworks that help teams move faster.

Nice To Haves

Depth in more than one technical domain, for example platform and infrastructure alongside consumer product, payments, or data.
Experience running programs across a globally distributed organization, where the teams you depend on sit in different time zones and decisions can't wait for everyone to be awake.

Responsibilities

Take programs from shapeless to executable: converge stakeholders on what problem is actually being solved, set the scope and what's explicitly out of it, establish who owns which decisions, and define what success will be measured by.
Own the execution strategy from there: turning competing priorities into a coherent plan with owners and sequencing, and making the calls that determine how the work comes together across Rover.
Drive decisions rather than track them. Frame the trade-off, make a recommendation, get the right people in the room, and identify the decision maker when the path forward isn't obvious, then land the decision and hold it.
Be the point of alignment across organizational boundaries: keep priorities cohesive, surface where they conflict, and get teams to a shared path forward without waiting for an escalation to force it.
Be a true peer to engineering on the technical dimension of the program, covering architecture implications, dependency chains, data integrity, and rollout and cutover planning.
Pressure-test timelines and sequencing before they slip.
Define and report the KPIs that tell teams whether a program is healthy, so risk surfaces early and progress is easy to communicate with confidence.
Be the source of truth for program health.
Build and maintain the artifacts that keep a program legible — charters, plans, dependency maps, risk registers, decision logs — and communicate crisply in both registers: the detail engineering needs and the summary a leadership audience can act on.
Own launch and delivery readiness, making sure everyone from engineering leads to executive sponsors has what they need to move forward.
Treat launch as a checkpoint rather than a finish line: the measurement that tells us whether the program delivered should outlast go-live.
Push AI tools further in how programs run: automating the reporting and tracking that doesn't need a human, and building the workflows and frameworks that help teams across the program move faster.
Ramp fast in unfamiliar domains: build the working relationships, learn enough of the system to ask the right questions, and earn credibility quickly when the teams are new to you.
Be the connective tissue across our Seattle and Barcelona teams, and contribute to Rover's TPM practice so each program runs better than the last.

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