Operational Excellence Lead

Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland, CA 

Role Type: Full-time 

Compensation: $135,000 or $155,000, depending on seniority

Reports to: Chief Administrative Officer

Visa sponsorship: Not available 

Hires remotely in: United States 

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About the Role

The Operational Excellence Lead will connect the organization's long-horizon, cross-functional, and external-facing strategy with internal execution. They will build the operating cadence, information flow, and forums that let the organization run performance-versus-plan at every level, and own the follow-through that keeps decisions and strategy connected across altitudes.

What Success Looks Like

• Leaders know where and why core impact metrics are moving, and how to intervene.
• Forums at every altitude (team level, functional leads, leads review) run with clear owners, decisions, and metrics.
• Operational systems drive high-quality, consistent reporting and better decision-making.
• Resourcing decisions are data-driven, and ROI is tracked over time.

Key Responsibilities

Organizational Strategy & Operating Cadence

Own the connective layer between long-term vision and strategy, and functional leads' near-term execution.

• Run performance-versus-plan and OKR processes across the organization, working with leads to define outcomes, metrics, and reporting cadence. Own core planning cycles (e.g., H2 planning) end to end - the calendar, the templates, and the cross-team dependencies.
• Consolidate fragmented ownership, and make ownership, decision-making, and escalation paths explicit.
• Facilitate cross-functional reviews that ladder up into organizational strategy; ask sharp questions, capture action items with clear owners and dates, and enforce time-boxing so discussions actually converge. 
• Communicate internally about our impact metric progress by owning the Impact Monthly meeting: build the update deck, and work with teams across the org to source the case studies and highlights that make it concrete.
• Partner with the Director of Talent to create org-wide communications calendar and content based on critical happenings.

Data & Financial Analysis

Ensures the organization has trustworthy, accessible data to run performance-versus-plan, understand unit economics and make resourcing decisions.

• Support the business case for strategic initiatives such as headcount requests, RFPs, or resourcing requests - making the value proposition clear and concrete using business cases, OKRs, or other appropriate value frameworks - before they're resourced.
• Pull and build your own analyses (e.g., in Looker) to diagnose what's driving or blocking core metrics like transitions, usage, CSAT, and launch momentum.
• Use data and diagnosis, not authority, to earn the trust of a highly analytical engineering and impact organization.

Continuous Improvement

Drive better decision making, organizational design and operating orientation using data-driven insights

• Pair alongside individual leaders on specific strategic challenges, both to bolster their output and to diagnose whether a gap is about skills, structure, or hiring.
• Inform performance management and promotions with impact data.
• Maintain a clear view of the organization's critical-path portfolio, including how it breaks down between funded work (what states or customers are paying us for) and unfunded work - a key input into planning and resourcing decisions.
• Continuously improve the operational excellence function's own methodology - refining the templates, tools, and processes it runs on (e.g., the PVP sheet, planning docs, review formats) - and share what's working across teams rather than reinventing it in each forum.

Systems Management

Designs systems to capture and improve our unit economics 

• Help define requirements for and implement a revenue operations system.
• Help the organization answer emerging questions about AI and tooling ROI.
• Define clear requirements for measuring cloud costs or personnel costs by state, partnering with an internal engineer or data partner to build the dashboard once the requirements are clear - bringing the finance and business framing that a purely technical build can miss.

Who You'll Work With

You’ll report to the Chief Administrative Officer. Your initial focus is the Impact organization and the Engineering leadership team, together the “core impact apparatus.” You’ll work closely with functional and technical leads across Impact and Engineering and with data and systems teams. Over time, as the role’s scope expands, you’ll also work with leaders in marketing, business development, finance, and people operations.

What We're Looking For

• A senior operator - likely from a product management, product operations or program management background.
• Strong analytical skills and genuine comfort with data: able to pull your own analysis from tools like Looker and build a credible, data-driven case, even without a formal technical or engineering background.
• High emotional intelligence: able to work with senior, strong-willed leaders and get them to take ownership, without dictating to them.
• Excellent synthesis and written communication: able to hold many concurrent threads, re-articulate strategy clearly, and drive high-quality, fast follow-up.
• A bias toward clarity and simplification - comfortable pushing to reduce the number of people involved in a decision or a meeting, not just adding structure.
• Comfortable constructively challenging partners and leaders - willing to stress-test thinking and push back, not just surface issues and let them sit.
• Steady under pressure; this role sits amid a lot of interpersonal complexity and needs someone with strong composure.
• Comfortable operating with significant seniority and scope from day one - this is intended as a senior hire, not an entry point into strategy work.
• Experience in government, public-sector, or B2G contexts, or with mission-driven and nonprofit organizations.
• Experience running OKR or performance-versus-plan processes at scale.