“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Right now, somebody is wishing. Specifically, two founders are wishing that the kit lands in the right building, in the right room, in the right week, already set up for the people who will use it. And then doing it themselves at 11pm, because there is nobody else to do it.
That is the job. You are the plan.
Our client is a venture-backed startup in downtown Brooklyn, backed by a recent raise and rolling a hardware-and-software platform out to schools across the country. Small team, serious traction, and a product that works.
The machine behind it does not exist yet. You are going to build it.
What you will actually own
Getting sites live. From signed purchase order to a building running smoothly on day one. Kit staged and shipped, rooms mapped, data synced out of the client’s own systems, training booked, and a self-install guide written so plainly that someone a thousand miles away gets the hardware mounted without a single confused phone call. Summer is the crunch: a huge wave of new sites onboarding at once. Every one of them has to land.
The in-person bit. A lot of this happens standing in corridors, not sitting in Notion. You will learn who actually holds the keys, who replies to texts, and who decides whether anything gets done before the afternoon. You will also stand in front of a staffroom full of people who have survived a dozen software rollouts and are not, by nature, a warm crowd. Winning that room is a core skill here, not a bonus.
The company’s daily rhythm. Deliveries, procurement, inventory, vendors, tooling, and one dashboard the whole team reviews every morning: what shipped, what slipped, who needs a call. You call the plan of the day for a small team that is about to get bigger.
Building yourself out of it. This is the part most ops people skip. Spot the pattern under the repeated problem, write the playbook, automate the thing that never needed a human. AI is genuinely part of the brief. Not “I use ChatGPT to tidy my emails”, but using it to interrogate a messy operation and build systems that outlive you. They will buy you whatever tooling works. Success is not how many rollouts you can carry on your back, it is how fast the next hire can carry one without you.
What they need to see
- 1 to 5 years in operations, implementation, deployment, field ops, program management, logistics or BizOps. Titles vary, the scar tissue does not.
- A problem-solver who is fine with no instructions. You will be handed ambiguity and asked for a number, a plan and a reason. Zooming from “what is our national delivery strategy” to “which box is missing a power cable” in the same hour is the whole job.
- Presence. Credibility with busy, sceptical people who did not ask for a new system. Quiet competence beats volume.
- AI used with judgement. Show them a system you improved with it, not a prompt you are proud of.
- Hands-on with ops tooling and hardware. Dashboards, CSV wrangling, data syncs, device pairing. You do not need to be an engineer, you do need to be the person who debugs it rather than escalates it.
- Humble and accountable. They have met plenty of candidates who rambled through a resume and had somehow never got anything wrong. Those people do not get offers here.
Nice to have: early-stage startup experience (pre-seed to Series A, or first ops hire), supply chain, procurement or distribution background, Zapier, Notion, Intercom, Brevo, and a degree or the equivalent earned the hard way.
The honest part
On-site in downtown Brooklyn, five days a week, 7am to 7pm. Site visits on Long Island three or four times a month, US conferences once or twice, all travel covered. Relocation support is possible for someone exceptional. No visa sponsorship: US citizens and Green Card holders only.
People have walked away from this one over the hours and the company’s age. Fair enough, it is not a role you take for balance. It is a role you take because you want an entire function in your hands at the exact moment it is being invented, with a direct path toward chief of staff and a founding team that will genuinely get out of your way.
Hiring process
A short intro call, a coffee in person, then a paid day in the office working on a real snapshot of their operation. Tip from the cheap seats: the people who do well ask awkward questions and point straight at the bottleneck. The people who do not just try to ship the boxes. References, then a decision inside a week or two.
Up to $165K base, plus meaningful equity, and you can weight the package toward cash or toward equity, your call.
If you are currently founding your own thing, this is not your moment, they have been clear on that.
Everyone else: send your resume through and let’s talk.
