Vice President, Marketplace Operations

Remote (United States)

Annual Salary Range:

$260,000 – $330,000 per year

Position Overview

This executive opportunity supports a multi-platform live event ticket marketplace available through iOS, Android, mobile web, and desktop. The platform provides access to more than 60,000 events across the United States and Canada.

The Vice President, Marketplace Operations will own the complete post-purchase customer journey, from transaction completion through issue resolution. The position will redesign the operating model with artificial intelligence at its center, creating systems that prevent service issues, automate resolutions, improve fulfillment reliability, and reduce operational costs.

This is not a traditional support queue management position. The role will build AI-powered systems that prevent customer contacts, establish product feedback loops that eliminate root causes, improve marketplace operations, and deliver measurable margin improvement without sacrificing the customer experience.

The Vice President, Marketplace Operations will report directly to the Chief Executive Officer, serve on the leadership team, and influence execution across Product, Product Operations, Supplier Operations, Engineering, and broader Marketplace functions.

What You’ll Do

AI-Powered Customer Experience Systems

• Design, build, and own conversational AI systems that resolve customer issues without human intervention.
• Develop solutions across chatbots, automated email responses, voice systems, and proactive customer outreach.
• Architect an AI-powered deflection layer that prevents avoidable issues from becoming support tickets.
• Define product requirements and drive implementation through Engineering and Product teams.
• Build systems beyond standard off-the-shelf deployments, with direct ownership of system design, requirements, implementation, and performance.
• Establish quality assurance, iteration, and continuous improvement processes for AI-powered customer experience tools.

Product Feedback and Root-Cause Elimination

• Own the feedback loop between customer experience operations and the product organization.
• Translate customer contact data and post-purchase signals into clearly ranked product priorities.
• Identify product gaps that generate preventable customer contacts, cancellations, refunds, chargebacks, or dissatisfaction.
• Convert contact-driver analysis into detailed product and engineering requirements.
• Partner with the Vice President of Product to prioritize and deliver product improvements that reduce customer contact volume and improve satisfaction.
• Create a credible, ranked, and appropriately sized post-purchase product roadmap driven by customer experience data.

Post-Purchase Measurement and Visibility

• Instrument the complete post-purchase experience and make operational performance observable in real time.
• Build the metric tree, dashboards, and alerting systems required to monitor post-purchase performance.
• Track cancellation rate, customer contact rate, customer satisfaction, resolution time, and the cost per order associated with these metrics.
• Establish clear ownership and accountability for each operational metric.
• Provide the executive team with decision-ready performance reporting suitable for board-level discussions.

Operating Margin and Cost Efficiency

• Own the unit economics of post-purchase marketplace operations.
• Drive structural reductions in customer experience cost per order.
• Reduce costs through AI deflection, process redesign, product improvements, and root-cause elimination rather than relying primarily on staffing reductions.
• Improve operating margins while maintaining or improving the customer experience.
• Build a clear financial case for customer experience infrastructure as a margin driver rather than a cost center.
• Communicate operational economics and investment requirements in terms relevant to executive and financial leadership.

Fulfillment and Post-Purchase Reliability

• Improve cancellation rates, on-time delivery, fulfillment reliability, and customer contact rates.
• Strengthen ticket transfer reliability and dispute resolution processes.
• Develop systems that identify and resolve operational problems before customers are affected.
• Address late deliveries, failed transfers, confusing refund experiences, and other post-purchase issues that affect cost, retention, and satisfaction.
• Connect fulfillment failures to measurable operational and financial outcomes.

Organizational Design and Leadership

• Redesign the operating structure so organizational capability grows faster than headcount.
• Create a higher-leverage team supported by artificial intelligence, automation, and improved workflows.
• Build a clear leadership structure and succession bench within the function.
• Embed AI-powered tools and practices into daily operations.
• Establish clear accountability, performance expectations, and decision ownership across the team.
• Support the development of an operations or customer experience organization that may grow to approximately 25–50 employees.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Own the operational relationship with the Product organization for all post-purchase priorities.
• Build evidence-based prioritization cases for product improvements that reduce customer contacts and improve satisfaction.
• Partner with Supplier Operations to connect supplier behavior with fulfillment failures and post-purchase outcomes.
• Develop scorecard inputs, escalation triggers, and supporting data that strengthen supplier accountability.
• Partner with Product Operations to align operating cadence, tooling, process improvements, and execution across marketplace operations.
• Influence Product, Product Operations, Supplier Operations, Engineering, and Marketplace teams to achieve shared operational outcomes.

What You’ll Deliver in the First Year

• Deploy an AI-powered deflection system that produces a measurable reduction in human-handled customer contacts.
• Maintain or improve customer satisfaction while increasing automated resolution volume.
• Build a real-time post-purchase metric tree with clear ownership for every major performance indicator.
• Provide the executive team with reliable reporting that can support board-level operating discussions.
• Deliver meaningful structural improvement in customer experience cost per order.
• Generate margin improvement through AI deflection, process redesign, and product fixes rather than simple headcount reductions.
• Create a ranked and appropriately sized post-purchase product roadmap that actively moves through Engineering.
• Reshape the organization to increase leverage per employee.
• Establish a strong leadership bench beneath this position.
• Embed artificial intelligence into daily customer experience and marketplace operations.

Qualifications

Required Experience and Capabilities

• At least seven years of operational experience in consumer marketplaces, ticketing, travel, or a comparable two-sided platform business.
• Direct experience in an environment where post-purchase performance affects customer retention and operating margin.
• Personal experience building or leading the implementation of AI-powered customer experience systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with chatbots, automated resolutions, proactive contact deflection, or comparable AI-powered service systems.
• Ability to design systems, write detailed requirements, and hold Engineering and Product teams accountable for delivery.
• Experience translating customer experience signals into product roadmap priorities.
• Ability to convert contact-driver analysis into prioritized engineering requests.
• Experience partnering with senior product leadership as a peer.
• A demonstrated record of personally improving cancellation rate, contact rate, customer satisfaction, resolution time, or comparable post-purchase reliability metrics.
• Direct ownership of the operational results achieved, rather than only executive oversight.
• Strong understanding of customer experience unit economics and cost-per-order performance.
• Experience improving operational costs through system design, automation, process redesign, and root-cause elimination.
• Understanding of supply-side operational failures and their impact on customer outcomes.
• Executive presence and the ability to contribute effectively as a member of the leadership team.
• Ability to develop a board-level performance narrative and advocate for investment in customer experience infrastructure.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in live events, ticketing, or experiential commerce.
• Direct experience building a customer experience AI platform from the ground up.
• Experience with vendor selection, system integration, prompt design, quality assurance, and ongoing platform iteration.
• Experience establishing an operating cadence from scratch, including metric trees, weekly business reviews, quarterly business reviews, and escalation procedures.
• Experience leading a customer experience or operations organization of approximately 25–50 employees.
• Experience connecting supplier behavior data to fulfillment and post-purchase customer outcomes.

Role Scope

• This position does not own demand-side growth or paid customer acquisition.
• This position does not own supplier acquisition or commercial supplier agreements.
• This position does not own pricing strategy or pricing algorithms.
• This position does not own the development of marketplace data science capabilities.
• This position does not own fraud and payments, which are managed by a peer function within Finance.
• The role will partner closely with each of these functions when their work affects marketplace and post-purchase operations.