Uber is moving to up its game in Australia, hiring marketers and legal eagles in both Sydney and Melbourne along with other Australia cities.
The app-based taxi network is focusing on the main hubs of Melbourne and Sydney, although it is hiring in Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth as well.
Among the Sydney and Melbourne roles up for grabs are those of business development and partnership lead, community operations manager, and lead country legal counsel.
Notably, it is hiring a demand manager.
According to the job ad, the demand manager will be responsible for:
“Dreaming up and then executing creative and scaleable rider focused marketing campaigns, negotiating partnerships with major Australian and international brands, managing teams of brand ambassadors, testing how to best market to drivers, writing blog posts, and answering rider support enquiries.”
With Uber suffering a PR black eye last year in both Australia and around the world, a lot of branding will need to be done to get the service back on track.
Most famously in Australia, surge pricing started to kick in during the Martin Place siege as a function of demand coming from around the area. Taxi prices reportedly got up to $150 to get out of the area.
While it was an automatic algorithm kicking in, it was far from a good look from the massive sharing economy app that could.
Also last year, Buzzfeed published remarks from Uber's senior vice president, Emil Michael, suggesting that it would be totally fine to start digging up dirt on journalists writing about the share-ride app.
It is also facing a number of regulatory challenges in Australia as lawmakers try to figure out how to regulate Uber's Uber X service.
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