Staff Technical Program Manager, New Verticals

DoorDash USA•Sunnyvale, CA

20h•$130,600 - $285,000•Onsite

About The Position

At DoorDash, the New Verticals team is building the future of local commerce by making cities shoppable. This involves expanding beyond the core marketplace into new fulfillment models and merchant-facing products, covering areas like groceries, convenience items, retail products, and more. The organization operates at significant scale and is looking for a Staff Technical Program Manager to lead complex, high-impact programs. This role is at the intersection of product, platform, and operations, translating business strategies into executable technical plans. The TPM will work across various initiatives including Grocery, Convenience, Retail, DashMart Fulfillment Services, and emerging Merchant Services. Success requires navigating interconnected systems, evolving product requirements, and dependencies across multiple DoorDash organizations. The role demands strong technical judgment, the ability to create clarity in ambiguous situations, proactive risk identification, and driving programs from strategy through launch and scale. The position reports into the centralized Technical Program Management team within Engineering and requires the candidate to be located in either the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree with experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering or other related discipline.
8+ years recent experience as a Technical Program Manager at a technology company.
Experience in large-scale distributed systems and system architecture.
Experience working with full-stack engineers and directly engaging on product development, with a thorough understanding of software development processes.
Project planning and execution skills that include reviewing technical design documents, estimating, and scheduling.
Experienced in working with large-scale distributed systems, as well as client-side and platform teams, who own Tier 0 services serving external customers.
Ability to speak to system architecture, scalability and reliability decisions, and design trade offs.
Strong leadership ability with the capacity to collaborate and build relationships across organizations, bridge gaps between teams, and successfully influence without authority.
Strong ownership, urgency, and drive; willingness to roll up sleeves and dive into details to understand and drive programs.
Excellent written & verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate with confidence, clarity, and focus.
Ability to convey concepts and considerations to non-experts and experts alike.
Pragmatic and detailed approach with a focus on progress, not perfection.

Responsibilities

Drive New Verticals' Most Strategic Programs: Partner closely with Engineering and Product leadership, Strategy & Operations, and cross-functional teams to turn New Verticals' strategy into executable technical programs. The portfolio spans growing Grocery and Convenience, scaling Retail selection and shopping experiences, evolving DashMart Fulfillment Services, and building new Merchant Services capabilities.
Lead Complex Cross-Organization Execution: Establish clear ownership and milestones, surface critical dependencies and tradeoffs, and drive alignment across teams when the path forward is not obvious, as New Verticals depends on capabilities across consumer experience, catalog and inventory, pricing and promotions, logistics, merchant integrations, ads, and platform infrastructure.
Bring Technical Depth and Systems Thinking: Develop a deep understanding of the architecture, data flows, and operational systems behind New Verticals. Engage in technical designs, identify scaling and reliability risks, understand how decisions in one part of the system affect the end-to-end customer and merchant experience, and help teams make pragmatic tradeoffs.
Turn Ambiguity into Strategy and Action: Truth-seek across technical and business inputs, frame the problem, clarify the definition of success, develop a point of view on risks and options, and create an execution path that teams and leaders can align behind for problems that do not begin with a clean scope or a single owner.
Connect Engineering Execution to Business Outcomes: Understand the customer, merchant, and economic outcomes behind the work and use that context to guide prioritization and execution, focusing on the technical work that matters most to the business, whether the goal is improving speed and quality, expanding selection, making shopping easier, or improving cost to serve.