Staff Technical Program Manager, Cross-Functional Programs

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.

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.

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.