The Abstract Operations Company Operations Partner Remote · Full time

Apply for Operations Partner

Details of the role

• Timing — Ongoing
• Location — We're a fully-remote team, but we have a mild preference for people located in the US
• Reporting — To either a) one of the Cofounders, or b) to a Client Operations Lead (who reports to a Cofounder)
• Summary responsibilities — Serve as a fractional COO / Chief of Staff to 6-8 startup CEOs/execs; play an essential part in "product operations" (taking our product's no-code internal infrastructure and turn it into processes to execute on client needs); research and problem-solving for client edge cases; continuously make our internal and client-facing processes more efficient by standardizing and reinventing things just enough.
• Compensation - more details here.

#1: The Career Track

You're someone who already understands startup operations with 2-5 years of experience. The thing that excites you is being a topic matter expert, and you might want to become a VP HR or Head of Finance. Some examples of previous experience:

• Operations Manager working on biz ops at a startup
• Paralegal at a startup law firm
• HR manager or Finance Analyst at a scaling company

You know what the job will take, you're very meticulous and organized, and you take pride in getting things done right. You might not have experience with client/customer facing roles, but you're excited by the idea of juggling a bunch of clients and executing on it all to make sure no balls get dropped. You know you'll hit the ground running and deliver value.

There are a couple of future paths for you:

• Growing on the client services side, where you would run a team of 3-6 operators (e.g., Director of Client Operations)
• Continue to serve in a client-facing role but with a more specialized focus that you find your passion in (e.g., compensation, or FP&A, or fundraising)
• Move more into the "product operations" side, where you're owning a certain aspect of how the product works, and working with product leadership to shape our roadmap

#2: The Tour of Duty Track

This track is expected to be a 12-18 month stint where you get exposure to every aspect of operations at several high-growth startups.

You're a generalist looking to break into startup operations and understand how they work before moving in-house. The thing that excites you is the idea of serving in a generalist leadership role (e.g., Chief of Staff, VP Biz Ops, COO), not expertise in a specific area, and that's what you're looking to do next.

Some examples of previous experience:

• A couple of years in banking or consulting, where you've worked on understanding corporations but not quite startups, and you want to break into tech startups. But not the rose-colored, buzzy version... you want to know what the actual work on the ground is like.
• You've been a founder or generalist early employee at a startup for a couple years, and want a better grounding before your next rodeo.

Here are the likely paths for this track:

• On the strategy / biz ops side, where we'll have GMs, hired internally or externally, for a number of business units we'll be spinning up in the next 3-24 months.
• We fully expect many clients to recruit ops leaders from within our ranks. We want to embrace this, if it's done the right way! We'll make proactive efforts to place you at clients (and elsewhere within our network), depending on your passions.
• You might decide to go start a company. We'd love to support you on this journey (and serve you as a client ;)) and we'll even potentially invest in your new endeavor.

Your responsibilities (regardless of track)

To start with, this person would be hands-on with a number of clients, working in the midst of a human-in-the-loop system; responsible for 6-8 clients, on a range of operational responsibilities. During this time, the role would include thing like:

• Client onboarding; weekly/biweekly check-ins with clients
• Conducting monthly audits / cleanup, working closely with client CEOs / execs to make sure that issues are resolved
• Research and problem solving; resolving edge cases which aren't covered (yet) by the platform
• Working with product and engineering team to a) develop upgrades to our process engine and b) inform our product roadmap based on dogfooding our early product releases.

Long term, we expect that the blocking-and-tackling will fade in favor of high-bandwidth problem solving (e.g., resolving sensitive special situations for clients), contributing to product (coordinating build and rollout of new product features), or working on a specialized team (e.g., become our senior in-house expert on HR compliance, equity, accounting, etc.).

Interview Process

• Phone Screen: 30 min with our recruiting team
• 1-2 Detailed Interviews with one of our co-founders and an Operations Partner / Lead
• 2 reference checks
• Offer & "Social Contract" (we love these! It's part of our culture)