Our client is a celebrated food marketplace that connects people with their greatest food memories, experiences and desires.
The Role
Marketplace Operations is a critical part of the company’s operational heartbeat. This role owns every operational touchpoint with the merchants we do business with from onboarding and product creation/moderation to day-to-day operational support and long-term success on the platform.
The Director of Marketplace Operations is accountable for the end-to-end merchant operational lifecycle, ensuring merchants are operationally enabled, supported at scale and positioned to grow over time. This includes ownership of Merchant Support, Product Build / Backend Enablement and the systems and processes that allow merchants to operate effectively within the marketplace.
This is a hands-on, systems-oriented leadership role that balances day-to-day operational excellence with longer-term strategy, tooling, and AI-driven transformation. The Director ensures SLA performance, drives high-quality merchant communication, represents the merchant voice cross-functionally, and builds scalable processes that prevent issues before they occur.
This role reports to the VP of Customer & Merchant Experience and serves as a senior operational leader, owning complexity, anticipating risk, and enabling the organization to scale merchant success sustainably.
What You’ll Do
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Lead and develop a team of 6-8 direct reports (including managers), setting clear expectations, coaching performance, and clarifying ownership and handoffs across functions.
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These individuals support key areas focus areas of the merchant lifecycle, including but not limited to: Merchant Support (SLA-based response, escalations, incident management) and Product Build / Backend Enablement (merchant onboarding, product creation, approvals, operational readiness)
- Own the end-to-end merchant operational experience, ensuring merchants are onboarded efficiently, operationally enabled, supported day-to-day, and positioned to grow successfully on the marketplace.
- Design and run operating cadences (triage, prioritization, escalations, queue health reviews, reporting) to ensure predictable performance at scale.
- Lead the response to merchant-impacting incidents, including cross-functional coordination, clear internal and external communication, root cause analysis, and preventative follow-ups.
- Design and own proactive monitoring and early-warning systems that identify emerging merchant and marketplace-level risks and enable preventative action ahead of peak periods and volume spikes.
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Enable and lead teams to proactively support merchant operational growth, including adding new products, expanding shipping days, increasing volume, and scaling categories responsibly.
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Own and evolve merchant-facing communication across channels (email, SMS, chat), including standards, tone, templates, and consistency.
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Serve as the merchant advocate in cross-functional forums, balancing merchant needs and operational realities.
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Translate merchant feedback and operational insights into clear requirements and priorities for Product, Engineering, Operations, and Logistics.
Qualifications
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Bachelor’s degree required; MBA or advanced degree a plus.
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8-10+ years in operational leadership spanning merchant/vendor support, marketplace operations, or supply-side partner management (ecommerce, perishables or logistics
strongly preferred).
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Proven experience managing both individuals and managers in high-volume, SLA-based operations with strong escalation and quality frameworks.
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Deep understanding of marketplace dynamics, including supporting supply-side partners producing inventory, SKUs, or experiences.
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Track record of building scalable processes, operating models, and preventative systems that reduce issues and improve partner outcomes.
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Strong project and program management skills; able to lead multi-threaded initiatives across teams.
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Excellent written and verbal communication skills; sets a high bar for external merchant communication.
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Analytical and metric-driven, with the ability to translate data into operational and strategic action.
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Experience designing and scaling multi-channel merchant support strategies (email, SMS, chat).
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Proven experience owning the strategy, implementation, and ongoing optimization of support and operational platforms (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce, Monday, Sigma and similar), within a marketplace environment, ensuring accurate intake, clean data flow, and operational scalability.
- Experience leveraging AI and automation to improve operational systems in a high volume or marketplace environment
Compensation
$160,000 – $180,000 depending on experience