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Salary: USD 130,100 - 198,000 / annual
Thumbtack is a home services marketplace that helps millions of homeowners find and hire local service professionals. The Service Operations team delivers operational excellence through program management, process automation, and workforce management.
As Senior Program Manager for Vendor and Scaled Operations, you will own Thumbtack's end-to-end outsourced and scaled delivery model. This is a specialized, high-leverage role focused on vendor strategy, governance, and long-horizon programs that determine how a significant portion of service delivery is executed.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own vendor and BPO strategy for Service Operations: sourcing decisions, make-versus-buy recommendations, capacity strategy across internal and partner channels, and decisions on expanding, consolidating, or exiting partnerships.
- Design and optimize vendor performance governance: SLA and scorecard architecture, QBR structure, decision rights, escalation paths, and remediation playbooks that are durable and reusable.
- Manage a portfolio of scaled operations programs spanning a year or more with real interdependencies. Set strategy, sequence work, make prioritization and capacity calls independently, and drive to business outcomes.
- Build measurement frameworks for the scaled delivery model: quality, SLA attainment, forecast accuracy, cost-to-serve, and leading indicators that reveal degradation before lagging metrics show problems.
- Align senior leaders across Service Operations, IT, Legal, Finance, Product, and Workforce Management on sourcing priorities and tradeoffs. Drive adoption through teams and partners who don't report to you.
- Identify and build AI and automation solutions that reduce coordination overhead and improve oversight at scale. Coach other program managers and institutionalize best practices into playbooks and standards.
- Own commercial relationships alongside Legal, Finance, and Procurement: SOWs, rate structures, SLA credits, remedies, and renewals. Know which levers to pull when performance slips.
You will work in high-ambiguity situations where much of the infrastructure does not yet exist. Building durable systems that outlast you is a core part of the role.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years in program or project management, including 3+ years owning vendor, BPO, or outsourced delivery relationships at scale. Experience with multiple vendors, multiple sites, or vendor transitions strongly preferred.
- Proficiency in program management tooling (Jira, Linear, Coda, Smartsheet) and fluency across Agile and Waterfall approaches. PMP, PgMP, or equivalent is nice-to-have.
- Deep vendor ownership and sourcing judgment. You must have personally owned an outsourcing relationship end-to-end (commercial terms, governance, performance management, escalation, difficult conversations), not just coordinated with someone else's relationship.
- Track record of building and defending make-versus-buy or vendor expansion cases with cost, quality, and risk modeling, presented to senior leadership.
- Portfolio-level ownership: run multiple concurrent scale programs with genuine tradeoffs, own prioritization and capacity calls yourself, and have experience with programs where consistency of human execution at volume is the product.
- Track record of building durable infrastructure (SLA architecture, governance models, transition playbooks, reporting systems) that other teams adopted and continue to use. You build and maintain models, dashboards, and SLA tracking yourself.
- Comfort operating where playbooks don't exist. You've stepped into situations with no established approach and built one, with judgment about when structure helps versus slows things down.
- Mentoring capability and a habit of leaving people better than you found them.
