Lead Technical Program Manager, Platform Engineering

About the Technical Program Management and Engineering Teams

Technical Program Management is a collaborative, engaging team with a high motor and strong domain and technical expertise.  We partner with engineering and teams across the business to drive discovery, prioritization, implementation, improvement, and ongoing management of high impact technical solutions and programs.  It’s our mission to help all of Thumbtack scale and get more done through technology and cross-functional alignment.

At Thumbtack, engineers at every level build products and systems that directly impact our customers and professionals. Our challenges span a wide variety of areas, ranging from architecting sound data and infrastructure to be leveraged across the company, to building search and booking experiences, to optimizing pricing systems, to building tools to help professionals grow their businesses. We believe in tackling these hard problems together as a team, with strong values around collaboration, ownership, and transparency. To read more about the hard problems that our team is taking on, visit our engineering blog.

About the Role

Thumbtack is looking for an experienced Technical Program Manager to build out and manage a program that delivers the technology strategy and roadmap for our Platform Engineering organization.  As the first dedicated TPM to this area at Thumbtack, we’re looking for the right person who’s excited about the unique and high impact opportunity to build something special.  You will lead complex, multi-disciplinary projects in a program that spans critical systems & application infrastructure, data & machine learning systems, developer experience and productivity, and vendor-managed services and platforms.  You will provide input and direction on solution design and prioritization, clarify outcomes and metrics, manage schedules and dependencies, and communicate progress with stakeholders and business leaders on initiatives that impact our internal and external users – from deployment of new technology, to large-scale infrastructure migrations, to definition of new processes, to enforcement of security policies, reliability measures, and data governance.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering leadership to develop a Platform Engineering program strategy, drive semi-annual planning to identify objectives and key results that support that strategy, and collaborate with engineering, product, data science, IT, and others to prioritize and resource dependent initiatives
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and relevant business teams to develop comprehensive and actionable plans, manage complex cross-team dependencies, and implement scalable tools, infrastructure, automation, and processes
• Utilize agile project management framework and techniques to plan, document, and manage both strategic and tactical initiatives from conception through delivery and closure
• Keep cross-functional stakeholders, contributors, executives, and interested parties engaged, aligned on strategy and involvement, and up-to-date on relevant details; escalate issues when necessary
• Ensure proper project closure by troubleshooting and resolving outstanding issues after launch, confirming solutions are in an acceptable state, and evaluating outcomes against objectives

What you'll need 

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or 5+ years of relevant experience in the field
• Proven experience owning the planning and delivery of a cross-functional engineering program
• Expert in agile project management, prioritization methodologies, and the software development lifecycle, with the ability to manage and prioritize many competing requests and cross-team dependencies
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; able to make thoughtful proposals, provide root cause analysis and demonstrate results through testing and metrics
• General understanding of modern best practices in more than one of: infrastructure/operations; frontend, backend, and/or native client application development; data or machine learning infrastructure
• Experience and expertise in managing technical projects and programs related to the following:
  • Running software applications on public cloud infrastructure
  • Application development and architecture in large-scale environments
  • Data infrastructure investments and tooling (build/buy, multi-cloud, etc.)
• Outstanding communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively set and manage stakeholder expectations

Bonus points if you have

• Experience with a multi-platform product for a mix of internal and external users
• Previous hands-on engineering experience
• Compliance management experience (e.g. CCPA/CPRA, CAN-SPAM, WCAG, PCI DSS, SOX)

Thumbtack is a virtual-first company, meaning you can live and work from any one of our approved locations across the United States, Canada or the Philippines.* Learn more about our virtual-first working model here.

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