Senior Program Manager (Vendor and Scaled Operations)

Join Thumbtack as a Senior Program Manager, Vendor & Scaled Operations. In this role, you will own the strategy, governance, and long-term programs for our outsourced and scaled delivery model. You will be responsible for making sourcing decisions, managing vendor relationships, and optimizing performance. This is a high-leverage, high-ambiguity role that requires a deep understanding of program management and vendor relationships.

About Thumbtack

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

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

Responsibilities

• 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, sequence the work, and drive it to business-level outcomes.
• 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
• Portfolio-level ownership. You've run multiple concurrent scale programs with genuine tradeoffs between them, and owned the prioritization and capacity calls yourself

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 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
• 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
• 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