Staff Technical Program Manager, Cross-Functional Programs

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. Some programs land with you because of their complexity, ambiguity, and visibility, not because of which part of the product they touch. Others you'll find yourself: you'll see the program Rover needs before anyone has named it, and make the case for it. You'll go deep enough in each domain to be genuinely useful, then do it again somewhere else. You'll often carry more than one of these at once, and your work will shape how engineering sets its priorities and OKRs, not just how a single program delivers.

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, and helping the TPMs around you get sharper too.

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:

• Identify the programs Rover needs before they're assigned: spot the cross-org problem no team owns, build the case for it, and stand it up.
• 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, across one or more concurrent programs: 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. Drive mitigation of department-level risks rather than only escalating them, and connect program KPIs to engineering's OKRs and department strategy.
• 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, building the workflows and frameworks that help teams across the program move faster, and evaluating and driving adoption of tools that raise efficiency across the department.
• 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 shape Rover's TPM practice so each program runs better than the last: mentor TPMs, help lead hiring for the function, set patterns others adopt, and know when to introduce new department-level process (and when not to).

Your Qualifications

• 11+ years driving complex, cross-functional technical programs.
• A track record of owning several high-complexity, ambiguous programs at once, end to end, across domains, including ones new to you. Some you identified and stood up yourself; for others, your first deliverable was the scope.
• 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 alignment across organizational lines up to senior leadership, including shaping department priorities, strategy, and OKRs. You can hold a room of partners with competing incentives, know when to make the call and when to find who owns it, 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, including across globally distributed teams where decisions can't wait for everyone to be awake.
• A history of making the people and practice around you better: mentoring TPMs or peers, interviewing and hiring, and building processes others adopt.

  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 at a marketplace, consumer tech, or SaaS company.

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 $182,290 - 227,863. 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.