Senior Program Manager, Trade
Description
The Opportunity:
TRUECar is building TRUECar Trade, a new business line that helps people sell or trade in their car at a fair, transparent price. We're hiring a Senior Program Manager to run the operating system for this team. Reporting to the SVP of Trade, you'll own the program plan, the gates that decide when we scale, and the weekly rhythm that keeps Product, Engineering, Operations, Dealer Sales, Legal, Finance and Analytics working on the same priorities. You'll also set up an agentic team to track status, prepare readouts, audit and flag risks, so the people on the team can spend their time on building and decisioning.
How you'll drive TRUECar's success:
- Own the integrated program plan for TRUECar Trade across its three build priorities, in order: vehicle condition capture, the dealer buyer network, and a frictionless transaction.
- Run pilot launches in new markets from readiness checklist through go-live, including dealer onboarding, operations staffing, support coverage and launch-day coordination.
- Manage the stage gates that decide when Trade expands: define exit criteria with Finance and the Exec committee, track progress against them weekly, and prepare the evidence for each gate review.
- Run the weekly operating rhythm, including status reviews, the KPI scorecard, and executive readouts that say where we are, what changed and what we need.
- Keep the decision log and the RAID register (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies) current, with a named owner and due date on every open item, and escalate early when a date or a metric is at risk.
- Coordinate Trade's dependencies on shared teams, including Engineering, Data Science, Dealer Sales, Marketing, Support, Legal and Finance, and on partners such as lenders, credit unions, affinity organizations and logistics providers.
- Partner with Legal and Compliance to setup and operate in conjunction with the requirements.
- Build and manage agentic workforce to supplement and accelerate all work functions of the teams.
- Build and maintain the program dashboard so anyone on the team can see milestones, owners, health and outcomes without asking.
- Measure outcomes over activity: tie every workstream to a metric, and report results after each launch.
- Find gaps in process, tooling or staffing as the business grows and propose efficient solutions to increase speed and achievement.
Your Expertise:
- 4+ years of progressively responsible program or project management experience, including at least one zero-to-one launch of a new product, business line or marketplace.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional programs that span technology, operations and commercial teams, with executive stakeholders.
- Track record of setting up operating cadences, stage gates and KPI scorecards that leaders use to make decisions.
- Demonstrated experience using AI tools (such as Claude) to accelerate planning, analysis, drafting and status reporting, and experience building or running AI agents or automated workflows that a team relies on.
- Effective written and verbal communication with all levels of the organization, including one-page readouts that lead with the answer.
- Strong analytical skills, and comfort building trackers and dashboards and pulling your own data.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a startup pace: you can make a plan with incomplete information, keep it current, and change it when the facts change.
- Strong capability in TRUECar preferred tools and productivity suites (Google Workspace, Asana, Tableau, Claude, etc.).
- Up to 20% travel, including pilot market launches.
- Automotive industry experience strongly preferred, especially in remarketing, wholesale, used-vehicle acquisition, dealer operations or automotive marketplaces.
- Bonus: working familiarity with SQL or Amplitude; PMP, PgMP or Agile certification; experience with regulated transactions such as vehicle titling, lending or payments.
