Direct Merchant Program Specialist

About the Role

The Program Specialist IV (Direct LoB) will own end-to-end operational excellence, stakeholder alignment, and program management for Japan’s Direct Merchant business. This role serves as the primary CommOps point of contact for Direct workflows, ensuring stable day-to-day operations, scalable process design, and readiness for product launches and merchant-facing policy changes.

The candidate will be responsible for maintaining and improving key support metrics (CSAT, Contact Rate, Automation Rate, etc), driving VOC insights, leading cross-functional initiatives, and ensuring operational continuity across Sales, Account Management, BPO vendors, Product, and Operations teams. As YoY Direct trips grow and new retail/logistics use cases expand, this role is critical to sustaining reliability, partner trust, and business growth.

Your Impact in Role:

1. Manage program governance for Direct-related initiatives, ensuring smooth launch readiness, scalable adoption, and high-quality merchant and customer experiences.
2. Drive incident and escalation management, serving as the first-line contact during outages, major campaigns, and merchant-impacting events.
3. Analyze operational data (CTGs, trends, inflow) to identify issues, propose improvements, and guide cross-functional teams toward actionable solutions.
4. Develop and maintain standardized operating procedures, training, and documentation to support BPO and partner teams.
5. Collaborate with Product teams to surface VOC, identify feature gaps, submit bug/UX requests, and influence the roadmap for Japan’s Direct business.
6. Lead BPO/vendor management for Direct workflows, ensuring performance, quality, and compliance across all support channels.
7. Support commercial growth initiatives, including retail expansion (Momo, PChome, Yamato), grocery use cases, contract renewals with national merchants, and new delivery models (3W, DP pickup, microDC).
8. Partner with local and regional leadership to align on strategy, prioritize operational gaps, and ensure Direct LoB projects contribute to 2025 strategic pillars.
9. Create and present insights to leadership, translating operational data into business impact and recommending structural improvements.

The Experience You'll Bring:

1. Fluency in English; business-level Japanese strongly preferred.
2. Proven ability to analyze operational data, identify root causes, and translate insights into scalable solutions.
3. Experience in program or project management within a complex, cross-functional environment.
4. Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence without authority.
5. Experience working with or managing BPO/vendor teams, ensuring high-quality execution.
6. Ability to operate in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and independently drive initiatives from ideation to execution.
7. Familiarity with operational workflows, product processes, and support ecosystems in high-growth businesses.
8. Comfortable leveraging AI tools and automation frameworks to drive operational efficiency.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Prior experience within Japan’s Merchant, Retail, Logistics, or Delivery industries.
2. Deep understanding of Uber’s Merchant ecosystem or experience supporting Japan-based merchants.
3. Track record of standing up or scaling operations in a global or regional organization.
4. Experience leading product-readiness initiatives and cross-functional launch planning.
5. Strong business acumen and ability to connect operational levers to broader commercial outcomes.
6. Previous ownership of highly complex workflows with multiple dependencies.
7. Strategic thinking with the ability to balance quick wins with long-term scalability.

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Ready to Ride?

This isn't the kind of place where you follow a playbook — it's where you help write one. If you're driven by impact, energized by challenge, and ready to shape how the world moves — we'd love to hear from you.

You may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and other compensation, as well as a range of benefits. Explore our benefits.

Offices remain key to collaboration and Uber's culture. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Some roles, like those at greenlight hubs, require full-time in-office presence. Ask your Recruiter for details about this role's requirements.

Uber is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.