Senior Technical Program Manager, Cross-Functional Programs

Job Description

Job Description

Who we are: 

At Rover, pets and their people are at the heart of everything we do. We connect pet parents with trusted pet care across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.

Headquartered in Seattle and Barcelona, we’re a values driven, fast-growing tech company focused on building safe and personalized experiences tailored to the needs of each unique pet. We’re investing in AI as a business accelerator and provide every team member access to AI tools in service of creating better experiences for our community.

We are proud to be recognized as a great place to work, having been named among the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Seattle Business Magazine and Washington’s Best Workplaces in the Puget Sound Business Journal. At Rover we’re committed to creating an accessible, inclusive, and welcoming community, which starts with our employees.

Want to make an impact? Join our pack and come work (and play!) with us.

Who We're Looking For
Some programs at Rover don't belong to any one team. They pull in product, engineering, data, operations, and the business all at once, and they're the ones that matter most: the platform bet that changes how three orgs build, the flagship feature that can't ship until four teams build against the same plan, the problem everyone agrees is important and nobody can quite scope.

Those programs need someone who owns them outright. You'll join Rover's Technical Program Management team, a small and growing function that sits at the center of how engineering delivers complex, cross-functional work. TPMs here own how programs get executed, drive alignment across organizational boundaries, and bring structured thinking to the hardest problems on the roadmap, all in service of better experiences for the pet parents and sitters who depend on our platform every day.

Your scope is defined by difficulty rather than by domain. Programs land with you because of their complexity, ambiguity, and visibility, not because of which part of the product they touch. You'll go deep enough in each domain to be genuinely useful, then do it again somewhere else.

Problems arrive without shape, and your first job is to give them one: a problem statement the room can commit to, a scope with an explicit boundary, named owners and decision rights, and a definition of success set before the build starts. Your second is the technical judgment to be a true peer to engineering: reading a dependency chain, evaluating trade-offs without needing full translation, knowing when to slow down and build the durable thing versus speed up and take on debt deliberately, and spotting where we're walking through a one-way door. You won't just run a playbook. You'll help write it, turning each program into repeatable patterns that make the next one sharper.

Most of it comes down to judgment. The role is a steady run of calls with no obviously right answer: when to force a decision and when to let a team keep exploring, when to escalate and when escalating costs more than the delay it saves, when good enough now beats correct later. What matters isn't whether you follow a process, it's whether those instincts are calibrated and you can explain them afterward.

That extends to how you use AI. We're looking for someone who's gone past automating the obvious, like status reports and risk tracking, and is thinking about where these tools change the work more fundamentally: untangling dependencies across a messy program, catching risk earlier in the signal, opening up new ways for distributed teams to collaborate. What matters isn't how many tools you've tried. It's your point of view on where they create real leverage.

This is a role for someone who moves easily across teams and domains, and brings order to complexity without adding bureaucracy.

This is a hybrid position that has the minimum expectation to work out of our Downtown Seattle Office two days per week on Mondays and Thursdays. For this reason, candidates must be based in the Greater Seattle Area or willing to relocate.

Your 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.

Your Qualifications:

• 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.
• You won't check every box on this list, and that's okay. If most of it sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

Nice to Have:

• 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.

Benefits of Working at Rover.com

• 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

Compensation:

• In the greater Seattle area the first-year salary range is $153,430 - $181,715. Additionally, Rover offers benefits to full-time employees.
• The cash compensation offered for this role will be dependent on the candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, and abilities as demonstrated in the interview and hiring process.

At Rover, we’re driven by seeing our people succeed and grow, while doing our jobs better than ever before. We believe the best business outcomes come from a diverse set of perspectives and we’re committed to promoting an inclusive, inventive, and fun environment with amazing employees. We welcome and encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply. 

Rover is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, military or veteran status, sex, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital or partnership status, genetic predisposition, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws.

We are committed to work with you to look for reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

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