The Role
The Director of Technical Program Management will lead complex initiatives, guide execution, mentor TPMs, and enhance collaboration across engineering and product teams.
Summary Generated by Built In
Who we are:
Want to make an impact? Join our pack and come work (and play!) with us.
We believe everyone deserves the unconditional love of a pet—and at Rover, our mission is to make it easier to experience that love. Founded in 2011, the Rover app and website connect dog and cat parents with loving pet sitters and dog walkers in neighborhoods across the US, Canada, and Europe. We empower our community of trusted pet sitters and dog walkers to run their own pet care businesses on Rover with the tools and security of a global company to back them.
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, we work closely with our teams in Barcelona, San Antonio, Spokane, and remote locations. We’ve got a reputation for being 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. We're an agile, fast-growing company, and our leadership comes from some of the world's most respected tech companies.
At Rover, our furry coworkers are just as important as our human ones—and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Along with making the joys of pet parenthood more accessible, we’re committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community of pet people—and that starts with our employees.
This is a hybrid position with the expectation of working 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 be willing to relocate.
Who We're Looking For:
Rover is looking for a Director of Technical Program Management to guide how complex technical work is planned, sequenced, and delivered as the company continues to evolve and invest across both existing and new product initiatives. As Rover’s systems and initiatives become more interconnected, this role focuses on building additional leverage—helping teams stay aligned, execution remain predictable, and outcomes remain strong.
This is a senior leadership role for someone who brings strong technical judgment, execution discipline, and systems thinking, combined with a player-coach mindset. The Director of TPM operates close to the work to influence decisions and outcomes, while also shaping how initiatives are structured, owned, and driven across the organization.
The role carries responsibility for leading and developing the TPM function at Rover—managing and coaching a small team of TPMs, setting clear expectations for effective program leadership, and establishing shared patterns and practices that strengthen execution consistency. Through a combination of hands-on engagement and organizational leadership, this role helps ensure complex initiatives are driven effectively and supported by durable execution practices.
Qualified candidates are comfortable operating in ambiguous, cross-functional environments, trusted by senior engineering and product leaders, and motivated by strengthening how complex technology organizations plan and execute work.
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.
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.
Top Skills
Data
Design
Engineering
Product Management
Technical Program Management
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The Company
What We Do
At Rover, everyone has ownership of their work and the opportunity to make a true impact. We believe that being diverse and inclusive is key to our success and encourage every employee to share their unique perspective while being their true self.
We believe everyone deserves the unconditional love of a pet, and Rover exists to make it easier to experience that love. We’re supporting dog owners and empowering dog sitters to run thriving pet-care businesses in your neighborhoods. The Rover app and website connect dog and cat parents with loving pet sitters and dog walkers in neighborhoods across the US, Canada, and Europe.
