Description
As Senior Program Manager, R&D Talent Programs, you will own the Product/Design talent program end to end,strategy, structure, cohort experience, and stakeholder alignment,serving as the primary point of contact and the planner who builds the cohorts that become the next generation of Toast's Product and Design leadership.
In this role, you will collaborate closely with the Early Careers team, who manages university partnerships and the talent pipeline, as well as the Recruitment team, who oversees candidate sourcing and requisition management.
Responsibilities:
- Own the Product and Design program side of our internship and early-career programs ,program design, structure, timeline, deliverables, communications, and intern experience once candidates are in the pipeline.
- Build a structure for managers to determine internship projects and team placements.
- Size and secure intern headcount each cycle, and partner with Early Careers/Recruitment to ensure hiring plans, timelines, and evaluation criteria set them up for success.
- Build world-class programming - including onboarding, an executive speaker series, intern showcase and capstone presentations, and cohort culture and community.
- Design the conversion process, including the evaluation frameworks, compensation packages, and “sell” experience.
- Keep stakeholders aligned and informed, from intern managers to leaders, on program direction, level, budget, and placement.
- Represent Product at university partner engagements and campus events set up by Early Careers.
- Run end-of-cycle retrospectives and translate them into the following year's plan, growing this from a single-cohort program into a durable, multi-function leadership pipeline for Toast.
- Design and build new talent programs over time,identifying where R&D's biggest talent gaps are, making the case for a program to address them, and standing it up from a blank page.
- Embrace and advocate for the use of AI tools to accelerate product discovery, streamline execution, and explore new product experiences.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of relevant experience across talent programs, early career or university recruiting, program management, or R&D/Product Operations.
- A track record of building and growing a talent program,you have stood something up and scaled it.
- University, MBA, or early-career recruiting experience strongly preferred, including familiarity with campus recruiting calendars and competitive dynamics.
- Exceptional program management: you can hold many parallel workstreams, stakeholders, and hard external deadlines without dropping any of them.
- Proven ability to influence without authority,briefing executives, holding senior managers to commitments, and absorbing pushback while keeping the program on track.
- Sound judgment on talent, with the ability to build and steward an evaluation bar and calibrate fairly across dissimilar work.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication; you distill complexity into clarity for audiences from interns to the executive team.
- Genuine energy for early-career talent.
Benefits: Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs.