Merchant Success Lead

About Us Tamara is a leading fintech platform in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region with a mission to help people own their dreams built on being simple, trusted, and everywhere our customers need us. Today, more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants depend on Tamara every day for reliable financial solutions across retail, travel, education, healthcare, and beyond. Tamara is backed by Sanabil Investments, a wholly owned company of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and SNB Capital, among others. Your role The Merchant Success Lead owns the Day 0–30 post-live health and early transaction performance of SMB merchants across the UAE. This role leads a team of Merchant Success team members across Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi and is accountable for ensuring merchants are operationally ready, properly trained, visibly set up, and supported to reach an impactful daily transaction volume Your responsibilities: Team leadership and coverage: - Lead, coach, and performance-manage a team of Merchant Success team members - Set city-level territories, merchant portfolios, visit plans, and daily priorities based on volume, risk, and activation opportunity - Build a field operating rhythm covering daily execution, weekly performance reviews, coaching, and quality checks - Conduct audits to improve merchant conversations and execution quality - Forecast capacity and rebalance workload to maintain SLA coverage across all assigned merchants - Create clear onboarding, playbooks, and performance expectations for new team members Day 0–30 merchant health ownership - Own Merchant Success execution from First Order Date until the merchant reaches a minimum threshold level of transactions or exits through an agreed recovery path - Ensure internal health checks are completed for merchants below a minimum number of orders, covering online visibility, in-store readiness, widget setup, marketing kit status, operational blockers, and order volume - Ensure external health checks are completed for merchants, including merchant contact or field visits, training reinforcement, visibility checks, and recovery planning - Confirm every unresolved issue has a named owner, next action, and committed due date - Monitor ageing merchants and intervene when cases are at risk of missing SLAs or remaining below the transaction threshold Performance management and reporting - Own the Merchant Success KPI dashboard and provide clear weekly performance reporting by city, team member, cohort, and issue type - Track leading and lagging indicators, including health-check SLA attainment, contact and visit completion, recovery rate, time to minimum transactions, merchant conversion, and CRM hygiene - Identify underperformance early and implement coaching or corrective action plans - Analyze recurring blockers and recommend changes to processes, materials, training, CRM journeys, or product experience - Maintain reliable pipeline visibility and communicate risks, dependencies, and decisions to leadership The Merchant Success Lead is expected to travel across select city footprints and maintain sufficient field presence to coach the team and understand merchant conditions firsthand. Your expertise - 2+ years of experience in merchant success, account management, field sales, retail operations, activation, or a related customer-facing function - 2+ years of direct people-management experience, ideally leading a distributed or field-based team - Demonstrated ability to manage performance through KPIs, operating cadences, coaching, and accountability - Strong communication, stakeholder-management, and escalation skills - Experience diagnosing operational blockers and coordinating multiple teams to drive resolution - Comfort working in the field and travelling regularly across Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi - Strong analytical skills and ability to turn performance data into priorities and actions - High ownership, attention to detail, and follow-through on time-sensitive SLAs - Ability to coach non-technical merchant or retail staff on product usage