Program Leader, Outage Management Lead – Community Operations

About the Role

At Uber, reliability is critical - and when outages or severe product issues occur, how we coordinate customer support responses directly impacts customer trust.

The Community Operations Outage Program Lead owns Uber’s global customer support coordination capability during outages and high-severity incidents. This role is responsible for ensuring that when issues impact customers our 24x7 Ops Commander team detects outages early, mobilizes the right stakeholders, activates clear guidance for support teams, and maintains structured coordination of organization through recovery.

You will lead the strategy and evolution of this capability - expanding the process and operating model covering both outages and critical outages, defining performance standards, strengthening detection maturity, improving stakeholder engagement precision, and driving tech to increase speed and accuracy.

A core part of this role is owning and maturing the 24x7 Ops Commander function. An Ops Commander Team Leader reports into this role and oversees the day-to-day management of the team, while the Outage Lead provides leadership, guidance, and capability development across the function - setting the bar for performance, culture, and operational discipline.

For Critical Outages, this role establishes and leads a global bench of crisis managers who can step in to run high-severity incidents across time zones, and acts as the designated lead for the US time zone. In this capacity, you drive rapid stakeholder mobilization, ensure structured impact assessment, and deliver clear, executive-ready communication through stabilization and recovery. After each event, you convert incident learnings into durable improvements to the outage frameworks, readiness standards, and playbooks.

This is a high-impact leadership role at the center of Uber’s crisis response ecosystem, directly shaping how we protect customer experience during outages. This role will give you the opportunity to drive large-scale impact and work with a wide range of stakeholders. You will leverage project management methodologies to manage multiple workstreams, lead org-wide integrations, and be an expert on outage management operations.

What You'll Do

• Global CommOps Strategy Ownership for Outage Management:

  • Lead the development of the vision and support strategy for outage management and severe incident management within the Community Operations org
  • Establish governance, decision rights, and success metrics that drive consistent execution across line of business

• Develop further and run the Outage + Critical Outage frameworks

  • Design and continuously improve the processes, playbooks, and escalation/routing standards for both standard outages and critical outages
  • Create risk- and scenario-based preparedness (coverage expectations, handoffs, comms standards, and readiness checks) working with global functional leads
  • Define the CommOps “source of truth” for impact sizing and operational reporting during outages and remediations phases

• Lead and Develop the Ops Commander Function

  • You will lead the 24x7 Ops Commander team through a Team Leader who oversees day-to-day operations.
  • You will set expectations, develop capability, define coverage strategy, and build a culture of ownership, calm execution, and structured decision-making in high-severity environments.

• Strengthen Early Detection and Incident Readiness

  • You will elevate support anomaly detection maturity in partnership with Engineering and Product, improving signal quality, reducing noise, and accelerating escalation precision for outages. You will ensure the Community Support organization is structurally prepared to respond quickly and effectively when incidents occur.

• Drive Technology Strategy

  • You will develop business cases and partner cross-functionally to implement tools and automation that improve detection speed, impact visibility, stakeholder routing, resolution verification, and executive reporting.

• Lead CommOps coordination during live Critical Outages

  • Lead and expand a global network of crisis managers who can step in to run high-severity incidents, ensuring consistent execution, clear ownership, and smooth handoffs across time zones.
  • Serve as the designated CommOps operational lead for US time zone critical outages, driving rapid stakeholder mobilization, structured impact assessment, and executive-ready communication throughout the event.
  • Guide CommOps through stabilization and recovery, ensuring resolution verification, operational readiness actions, and clear closure criteria.
  • Translate incident learnings into system improvements, updating the Critical Outage framework, readiness practices, and playbooks to reduce recurrence and improve future response.

Basic Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in program management, incident management, customer operations or large-scale cross-functional environments including 3+ years of experience leading teams
• Bachelors Degree Obtained

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in high-severity or crisis / incident / outage environments requiring structured decision-making under pressure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience delivering executive-level updates.
• Ability to drive consensus and actionable results across highly cross-functional teams
• Experience in large-scale customer support or global operations environments.
• Experience in designing and implementing support processes, or AI-enabled operational solutions.
• Data-driven mentality and strong business judgment. Able to analyze the data, pull key insights, and tell a compelling story to inform decisions
• Track record of balancing analytical strategic thinking with quick decision-making, change management, and timely execution
• Experience working with ambiguity in a fast-paced environment
• ITIL or equivalent service management certification
• Program Management experience or equivalent

For Phoenix, AZ-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$130,000 per year - USD$144,000 per year.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$162,000 per year - USD$180,000 per year.

For all US locations, you will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits. More details can be found at the following link https://jobs.uber.com/en/benefits.

Uber's mission is to reimagine the way the world moves for the better. Here, bold ideas create real-world impact, challenges drive growth, and speed fuels progress. What moves us, moves the world - let's move it forward, together.

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.

Offices continue to be central to collaboration and Uber's cultural identity. Unless formally approved to work fully remotely, Uber expects employees to spend at least half of their work time in their assigned office. For certain roles, such as those based at green-light hubs, employees are expected to be in-office for 100% of their time. Please speak with your recruiter to better understand in-office expectations for this role.