Research Operations Program Manager

Thumbtack 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 to do when to do them and who to hire from our growing community of 300000 local service businesses. If making an impact inspires you join us. Imagine what well build together.

About the Research Team

The Research team at Thumbtack is dedicated to creating experiences that help homeowners and pros feel confident capable and connected. Our team of nine researchers partners closely with product design and engineering to uncover deep insights into how people find hire and work with local professionals and how pros grow their businesses on our platform.

Were collaborative curious and motivated by impact. Research at Thumbtack is embedded within product teams but operates as a tight-knit community of practice. The Research Operations function plays a central role in ensuring our researchers can focus on insight generation while maintaining consistency quality and shared learning across the company.

About the Role

The Research Operations Program Manager will design scale and continuously improve the systems that power high-quality impactful user and market research at Thumbtack and the culture that sustains the people who do it.

This role owns the operational backbone of the Research team: recruiting and incentives tooling and data systems budgets and vendor management onboarding and L&D and team culture initiatives. Youll be both a strategic systems builder and a hands-on partner who ensures researchers have what they need to plan run and share their work effectively.

Youll be the connective tissue between people process and technology helping researchers focus on what they do best: uncovering insights that move our customers and pros forward.

Youll work closely with researchers leadership and Design Operations to ensure our research practice runs smoothly efficiently and with a strong sense of team connection.

What youll do

• Design scale and govern the systems and tools that support high-quality efficient user and market research.
• Maintain and evolve our research repository as a reliable searchable well-structured source of insights.
• Lead participant operations including recruiting incentives and vendor management ensuring ethical smooth and privacy-aligned execution.
• Partner with Engineering Data Legal and IT to maintain integrated compliant and secure data and tooling environments.
• Drive operational excellence through budget oversight contracts procurement and frameworks that clarify roles and reduce friction.
• Provide hands-on operational support for studies when needed coordinating logistics and anticipating risks or dependencies.
• Track and report research activities to improve visibility efficiency and strategic planning across the team.
• Support research culture and growth through onboarding L&D team events knowledge-sharing and initiatives that foster belonging and collaboration.

In order to be successful you must bring

• 5 years in program management operations or research enablement roles; 3 years dedicated to Research Operations.
• Proven ability to build scale and maintain research systems repositories and operational processes in a fast-moving tech environment.
• Deep understanding of participant operations research logistics compliance and ethical best practices.
• Skilled at diagnosing and solving complex operational and technical problems including evaluating and implementing new tools or workflows.
• Strong project management and coordination abilities with a track record of aligning diverse stakeholders.
• Experience managing budgets contracts and vendor relationships with accuracy and accountability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to build trust across teams and facilitate effective collaboration.
• Demonstrated passion for nurturing team culture supporting learning and fostering connection in distributed environments; operates with precision ownership and continuous improvement.

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Thumbtack embraces diversity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of sex race color age pregnancy sexual orientation gender identity or expression religion national origin ancestry citizenship marital status military or veteran status genetic information disability status or any other characteristic protected by federal provincial state or local law. We also will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records consistent with applicable law.

Thumbtack is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation for a medical condition or disability during any part of the application process please contact: .

If you are a California resident please review information regarding your rights under California privacy laws contained in Thumbtacks Privacy policy available at put as much craftsmanship into candidate safety as we do into the hiring experience itself. While scammers may try to impersonate our team well never ask you for money banking info or SSNs during hiring. Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes.