Senior Program Manager (Vendor and Scaled Operations)

Join Thumbtack, a mission-driven company dedicated to helping small business owners thrive. As a Senior Program Manager, Vendor & Scaled Operations, you will own our outsourced and scaled delivery model, driving strategic initiatives that improve processes, tools, and day-to-day operations. You will work closely with various teams, including Service, Business Apps, QA, Enablement, and Analytics, to deliver world-class service through operational excellence. This is a high-leverage, high-ambiguity role that requires strong program management skills and a deep understanding of vendor relationships.

• Own Thumbtack's vendor and outsourcing strategy for Service Operations, including sourcing decisions and capacity strategy.
• Design and optimize the governance model for vendor performance, including SLA and scorecard architecture.
• Set the strategy for a portfolio of programs, drive them to business-level outcomes, and establish operating rhythms.

• Comfort where the playbook doesn't exist, and a habit of leaving people better than you found them. You've stepped into situations with no established approach and built one, with the judgment to know when structure helps and when it would slow things down - and you've mentored program managers or been the person other teams borrow practices from
• A track record of building durable infrastructure. SLA and scorecard architecture, governance models, transition playbooks, reporting systems - things other teams adopted and still use. You build and maintain the models, dashboards, and SLA tracking yourself rather than waiting for someone else to instrument it
• Portfolio-level ownership. You've run multiple concurrent scale programs with genuine tradeoffs between them, and owned the prioritization and capacity calls yourself. You've run programs where consistency of human execution at volume is the product - you know how to design for repeatability, and you spot degradation from leading indicators rather than after the fact
• Deep vendor ownership and sourcing judgment. You've personally owned an outsourcing relationship end to end - commercial terms, governance, performance management, escalation, and the hard conversations - not just coordinated with one someone else owned. You've also built and defended a make-versus-buy or vendor expansion case with cost, quality, and risk modeling, and taken it to senior leadership
• 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 a vendor transition is strongly preferred. Proficiency in program management tooling (e.g., Jira, Linear, Coda, Smartsheet) and fluency across Agile and Waterfall approaches. PMP, PgMP, or equivalent is nice-to-have