Director, Technical Program Manager

Your Responsibilities:

• Provide program leadership and execution guidance for high-impact, cross-functional initiatives, stepping in directly when appropriate while ensuring work is effectively driven by the right roles.
• Evolve how Rover plans, sequences, and delivers complex, cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Support alignment across teams by anticipating and addressing dependencies, risks, tradeoffs, and sequencing challenges in ambiguous environments.
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and Data leaders to clarify ownership, scope, milestones, success metrics, and tradeoffs for major initiatives.
• Serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders, helping teams navigate ambiguity and make informed execution decisions across organizational boundaries.
• Build, manage, and mentor a small team of Technical Program Managers, coaching them on execution rigor, judgment, and cross-functional influence.
• Lead and develop the TPM function, establishing shared expectations, patterns, and practices that strengthen execution consistency and effectiveness over time.
• Provide data-driven visibility into execution health to enable faster decision-making, surface tradeoffs, and proactively address risks with senior leaders and executives.
• Define and use execution and program-level metrics to preserve strong outcomes while increasing consistency and leverage across initiatives.
• Serve as a trusted technical thought partner, bringing deep understanding of Rover’s systems, platforms, and architecture to planning and execution discussions.
• Ensure initiatives appropriately account for system design, reliability, security, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive a culture of accountability, ownership, and cross-functional trust that supports effective execution and strong collaboration across teams.

Your Qualifications:

• 15+ years of experience leading large-scale technical programs in complex engineering environments.
• Experience defining, shaping, and scaling a Technical Program Management function, including organizational structure, role definitions, engagement models with cross-functional partners, and the evolution of TPM practices over time.
• Proven success leading highly complex, cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple teams and domains, often over multiple quarters, where execution decisions had clear customer or business impact.
• Strong technical foundation with the ability to understand and reason about complex, interconnected systems and architectures, including large, customer-facing platforms with reliability, scalability, and performance considerations.
• Excellent communication and influence skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous environments.

Nice to Have:

• Background working with platform, infrastructure, or data teams.
• Experience in marketplace, consumer, or global products.

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 $188,330-250,479 with a 15% bonus. Additionally, Rover offers a long-term incentive plan with a company performance-based cash payout and 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.