Senior Program Manager, Vendor and Scaled Operations
ThumbtackThumbtack helps millions of people confidently care for their homes.
Thumbtack is the one app you need to take care of and improve your home — from personalized guidance to AI tools and a best-in-class hiring experience. Every day in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to complete urgent repairs, seasonal maintenance and bigger improvements. We help homeowners know which projects t
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o do, when to do them and who to hire from our growing community of 300,000 local service businesses. If making an impact inspires you, join us. Imagine what we’ll build together.
About The Service Operations Team
We're a tight-knit team of program management, process & automation, and workforce management professionals working together to deliver world-class service through operational excellence and strategic enablement. We collaborate closely with frontline Service, Business Apps, QA, Enablement, and Analytics teams to plan and deliver on complex initiatives that improve processes, tools, and how our service operates day-to-day. Our focus is on creating service experiences that are both efficient for our operations team while providing an excellent experience for our customers and pros.
About The Role
As a Senior Program Manager, Vendor & Scaled Operations within Thumbtack's Service Operations PMO, you will own our outsourced and scaled delivery model - the strategy, the governance, and the long-horizon programs that determine how a meaningful share of our service gets delivered. This is not a generalist PM role. It is purpose-built for someone who can hold a commercial relationship, an operational system, and an executive narrative at the same time.
You will own Thumbtack's vendor and BPO strategy for Service Operations end to end: how we decide what to outsource, how we hold partners accountable, how we govern performance, and how we scale or unwind capacity as the business changes. You'll own a portfolio of scaled operations and partner support programs spanning a year or more, with real interdependencies between them, and you'll make the prioritization and capacity calls across that portfolio rather than escalating them.
You'll also be the person leadership turns to for the make-versus-buy conversation. Expect to build the cost, quality, and risk case for how we scale, bring it to senior leaders and to vendor executives, and then be accountable for the model you recommended.
This is a high-leverage, high-ambiguity role. Much of the infrastructure you'll need does not fully exist yet, and building it durably - so it outlasts you - is a core part of the job.
What You’ll Do
• Own Thumbtack's vendor and outsourcing strategy for Service Operations - sourcing decisions, make-versus-buy recommendations, capacity strategy across internal, vendor, and partner channels, and the case for expanding, consolidating, or exiting a partner. Own the commercial relationship alongside Legal, Finance, and Procurement (SOWs, rate structures, SLA credits and remedies, renewals) and know which levers to pull when performance slips.
• Design and optimize the governance model for vendor performance: SLA and scorecard architecture, QBR structure, decision rights, escalation paths, and remediation playbooks. Build durable frameworks, not one-off trackers.
• Own a portfolio of programs. Set the strategy, sequence the work, decide what does and doesn't get done, drive it to business-level outcomes, and establish the operating rhythms - cadences, decision logs, dependency tracking, escalation thresholds, change communication - that keep distributed, multi-party delivery predictable.
• Build the measurement framework for the scaled delivery model: quality, SLA attainment, forecast accuracy, cost-to-serve, and the leading indicators that reveal a program is silently degrading before the lagging metrics do. Define what "good" looks like and close the loop so performance data actually changes behavior - on our side and the vendor's.
• Align senior leaders an