Staff Technical Program Manager, Cross-Functional Programs

Rover.com•Seattle, WA

4d•$182,290 - $227,863•Hybrid

About The Position

Rover is hiring a Staff Technical Program Manager to lead complex, high-visibility technical programs that span product, engineering, data, operations, and business teams. The role is part of a small and growing Technical Program Management team, responsible for executing cross-functional work, aligning teams across organizational boundaries, and bringing structure to difficult, ambiguous problems. Programs may be assigned based on their complexity or identified and proposed by the TPM. The role may own multiple concurrent programs across different domains and help shape engineering priorities and OKRs. The TPM defines programs from the outset by clarifying the problem, scope, decision ownership, and success measures. They set execution strategy, exercise technical judgment alongside engineering, drive decisions, manage dependencies and risks, and ensure teams are aligned. They also create reusable practices, mentor other TPMs, contribute to hiring, and help shape the TPM function. Rover is looking for someone who can use AI tools to improve how programs operate, beyond routine automation. This is a hybrid position with an expectation to work from Rover’s Downtown Seattle office on Mondays and Thursdays. Candidates must be based in the Greater Seattle Area or willing to relocate. The first-year salary range in the greater Seattle area is $182,290–$227,863. Cash compensation depends on the candidate’s experience, qualifications, skills, and abilities. Rover offers benefits to full-time employees.

Requirements

11+ years of experience driving complex, cross-functional technical programs.
Experience owning multiple high-complexity, ambiguous programs concurrently and end to end across domains, including programs in unfamiliar areas; experience identifying and standing up some programs independently.
Ability to orient quickly amid incomplete or conflicting information, distinguish genuine unknowns from unasked questions, and break ambiguous problems into actionable parts.
High agency in driving decisions and aligning stakeholders across organizational boundaries through senior leadership, including shaping department priorities, strategy, and OKRs.
Strong judgment under uncertainty, including the ability to decide when to force or defer a decision, escalate or absorb risk, and hold or adjust scope; ability to explain decisions and reflect on outcomes.
Technical acumen to engage as a peer to engineering, including reading dependency chains, evaluating trade-offs, discussing technical approaches, identifying sequencing risks, and recognizing architectural changes and one-way-door decisions.
Strong program management skills, including planning, status processes, decision-making cadence, metrics-based risk and progress reporting, post-launch measurement, and proactive identification of execution gaps.
Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences and bridge teams across globally distributed locations and time zones.
Experience mentoring TPMs or peers, interviewing and hiring, and creating processes others adopt.
Experience using AI tools to automate repetitive work, build custom workflows, or create frameworks that help teams work faster.

Nice To Haves

Depth in more than one technical domain, such as platform and infrastructure alongside consumer product, payments, or data.
Experience at a marketplace, consumer technology, or SaaS company.

Responsibilities

Identify cross-organizational programs that Rover needs, build the case for them, and establish them.
Turn ambiguous problems into executable programs by aligning stakeholders on the problem, scope and exclusions, decision ownership, and success measures.
Set execution strategy across one or more concurrent programs, creating coherent plans with priorities, owners, and sequencing.
Drive decisions by framing trade-offs, recommending a path, convening the right people, identifying decision-makers, and securing and maintaining decisions.
Align teams across organizational boundaries, surface conflicting priorities, and establish a shared path forward.
Partner with engineering on architecture implications, dependencies, data integrity, rollout and cutover planning, timelines, and sequencing.
Define and report program health KPIs, surface risks early, drive mitigation of department-level risks, and connect program metrics to engineering OKRs and department strategy.
Maintain program source-of-truth artifacts, including charters, plans, dependency maps, risk registers, and decision logs; communicate details to engineering and actionable summaries to leadership.
Own launch and delivery readiness, and ensure post-launch measurement determines whether the program delivered its intended outcomes.
Extend the use of AI tools in program operations by automating reporting and tracking, building workflows and frameworks, and evaluating and driving adoption of efficiency-improving tools.
Ramp quickly in unfamiliar domains by building relationships, learning relevant systems, and establishing credibility.
Connect Seattle and Barcelona teams; mentor TPMs, contribute to hiring, establish reusable practices, and determine when department-level processes are appropriate.