Director, Marketplace Operations

Job description

Mission Every consumer on earth purchases in one of three places: online, big-box retail, or mom-and-pop shops. Paradoxically, the largest commercial channel is, by far, humble traditional trade shops. Yet they remain fragmented, offline, and opaque. Native is the first intelligence-grade system built to penetrate this opacity. Each analog store is digitized into a dynamic graph where noise is filtered into low latency signals, transforming the antiquated offline world into advanced digital intelligence. Commercial leaders gain the precision to see what others cannot, store by store, rendering decisive decision advantage to win the market. Join the ground floor of the only platform engineered to decode the analog economy into operational dominance. Talent Values High Leverage : Consistent ability to attain the productive capacity of 5-10 people through grit, raw talent, and sheer force of will. High Agency : Relentless sense of ownership in the outcome, regardless of circumstance, acting decisively to shape the environment rather than being shaped by it. Curiosity With Discipline : An evidence seeking, measurement mindset without succumbing to analysis paralysis, and a penchant for experimentation. Intellectual Honesty : Certain enough to act, humble enough to always be learning. Role Native is hiring a Director, Marketplace Ops to lead operations leading all aspects of the supply-side of our global on-demand marketplace, This person will own marketplace mechanics that determine whether Native has enough supply, in the right locations, accepting the right work, completing it on time, and producing customer-ready data at the right unit economics. Native’s marketplace operates in a similar fashion to rideshare or food delivery, but with material advantages in terms of sustained demand without the same severity in the peaks and troughs attendant to its B2C counterparts. Native’s marketplace is a distributed contributor network. Contributors use the Native app to complete data collection work across Latin America, Africa, and other emerging markets. As such, this role requires someone with a strong command of core end-to-end marketplace ops and the requisite analytical sophistication to lead optimization, a/b testing, and rapid iteration. Native’s data collection operations are in a state of transition, from legacy methods to the marketplace. The formation of this role comes a critical point of this transition, offering both fast-moving challenges and immediate company-wide impact both tactically in the short-term and strategically as we move to digitize the largest market on earth. Though the task performed by the supply side of the marketplace may be data collection through mobile sensors, Native does not need someone whose primary experience is managing auditors, running projects manually, or coordinating field teams through brute force. The role requires someone who has operated a scaled online/offline marketplace and understands the mechanics of supply acquisition and engagement, marketplace liquidity, dispatch and routing, incentive deployment, surge pricing, and a/b testing to optimize at scale. The role is both operational and product-facing. This person must be able to operate the marketplace today while helping define the platform Native needs tomorrow. Native’s product and engineering organization is divided into specific Strike Teams –cross-disciplinary pods organized for specific objectives. One of these Strike Teams (Strike Team-003) is solely dedicated to the optimization of data collection, offering an institutionalized R&D counterpart to the Ops function. This role will be expected to support driving product requirements to that Strike Team to ensure the marketplace is optimized for performance. includes the dispatch engine, route execution model, contributor app workflows, incentive configuration, payment visibility, claims handling, exception handling, and live marketplace dashboards, among other areas. The mandate is to make Native’s marketplace legible, steerable, and scalable. The person in this role will help convert distributed field execution from a project-by-project operating challenge into a repeatable marketplace system. Core Responsibilities: Build the Dispatch Model : Design and operate the core marketplace workflow from demand forecast to supply check, coverage gap, pricing or incentive intervention, route or task assignment, contributor acceptance, completion, validation, and payment. Define how Native moves from open task availability toward structured dispatch, route bundles, assignment logic, and clear execution units. Own Marketplace Health : Build the operating cadence and metrics for marketplace performance across supply the drive acquisition, engagement, and retention, while meeting enterprise-level demands for coverage, reliability, making marketplace health visible by city, product, route, contributor cohort, and execution model. Design Incentives and Pricing Mechanics : Own the operating logic for bonuses, dynamic pricing, route economics, activation incentives, completion incentives, weather interventions, geography premiums, and other mechanisms that shape contributor behavior. Every incentive should have a hypothesis, a measurement, and a decision. Partner With Product & Engineering on Marketplace Tooling : Translate marketplace operations requirements into product workflows, user stories, dashboards, control panels, and app functionality. Work with Product and Engineering on the dispatch engine, route execution, contributor app experience, payment tracking, claims, exception handling, and OpsHub marketplace views. Operate the Contributor Execution System : Build repeatable playbooks for public network, managed network, and supplier-led execution. Define how Native identifies execution risk, intervenes when coverage is off-track, reallocates work, activates backup supply, handles exceptions, and closes routes or campaigns with confidence. Improve the Contributor Experience : Understand the contributor journey from available work to acceptance, collection, submission, feedback, incentive tracking, payment tracking, and claims. Reduce friction, improve trust, and ensure contributors understand what work is available, what it pays, what is expected, and where they stand. Requirements Established Online/Offline Marketplace Experience : Demonstrated experience operating, improving, or scaling a marketplace business where independent gig economy workers accept and complete paid work through a mobile platform. This is the non-negotiable requirement. We are looking for someone who has worked inside an established gig marketplace environment ( eg rideshare, food delivery ) and understands how these systems operate at scale through robust marketplace dynamics not open-ended crowdsourcing. Supply-Demand Marketplace Mechanics : Deep understanding of how two-sided marketplaces balance demand and supply across geographies, time windows, worker availability, pricing, incentives, acceptance, completion, reliability, and cost. You should understand the operational levers that move marketplace performance, not just the reporting that describes it. Dispatch and Acceptance Systems : Experience with marketplace models where work is offered, accepted, routed, batched, sequenced, or dynamically allocated to a distributed worker base. You should understand the trade-offs between open availability, assignment, bundling, routing, surge, bonuses, and other intervention mechanisms. Worker Behavior and Incentive Design : Strong instincts for how gig workers make decisions: what makes them accept or reject work, how earnings visibility changes behavior, how trust affects retention, when incentives work, when they do not, and how timing, geography, friction, and communication affect completion. Marketplace Performance Ownership: Experience owning operational metrics such as supply availability, demand coverage, acceptance rate, completion rate, fulfillment rate, worker productivity, reliability, retention, incentive efficiency, cost per completed unit, and marketplace contribution margin. Analytical Operating Muscle : Ability to diagnose marketplace performance using data, not anecdotes. Must be comfortable working directly with dashboards, spreadsheets, cohort views, funnel metrics, and marketplace data to identify bottlenecks, test interventions, and improve performance. Fluency in SQL to configure robust a/b may be required. Product Partnership : Experience working with Product and Engineering teams (particularly Strike Team-003) to turn marketplace operations problems into clear product requirements, workflow definitions, user stories, dashboards, control panels, and implementation priorities. Execution Under Ambiguity : Ability to build while operating. Native is developing a new marketplace operating model, not inheriting a finished system. This person must be comfortable creating structure, playbooks, metrics, and tools while still supporting live execution. Communication and Leadership : Ability to communicate at Director level with Operations, Product, Engineering, Finance, Marketing, and regional teams. Must be able to explain marketplace trade-offs clearly, make evidence-based recommendations, and drive alignment across functions. Preferred Qualifications Ops experience at a high-scale consumer online/offline marketplace where independent workers complete paid work through a mobile app. Experience operating marketplaces across multiple cities, countries, or regions. Experience with marketplace operations in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, or other emerging markets. Experience working on dispatch, batching, routing, assignment, supply-demand balancing, pricing, bonuses, surge, incentives, or worker activation. Experience improving downstream marketplace outcomes such as accepted work, completed work, reliable supply, active worker retention, earnings efficiency, and cost per completed unit. Experience working with mobile app product teams on worker-facing functionality, including work offers, acceptance flows, earnings visibility, task or route instructions, issue reporting, payment tracking, and support workflows. Experience building marketplace control rooms, city-level operating cadences, intervention playbooks, or performance dashboards. Experience using SQL, BI tools, analytics platforms, or marketplace reporting infrastructure is a plus, but not required. Experience with field data collection, retail audits, CPG, market measurement, census work, invoice collection, or market research is useful context, but not a substitute for gig marketplace experience. Strong interest in mobile technology, distributed workforces, emerging markets, operational data, and building systems that create greater transparency in the world. Company Native is a focused spinout backed by Vista, a $100B fund backing leaders in Artificial Intelligence and advanced technologies. Its mandate is to build the first intelligence-grade system for the world’s largest and least-understood channel of trade. It’s doing this by reverse-engineering analog markets into a digital graph, delivering precision, clarity, and control at enterprise scale. It is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Mexico City and Bogotá. Location Cape Town Mexico City Bogotá