Head of Strategic Operations (Sr. Manager/Director)

Head of Strategic Operations (Sr. Manager/Director) About Collective: Collective is on a mission to redefine the way businesses-of-one work. Our technology and team of trusted advisors help members achieve financial independence by taking care of everything from business incorporation to accounting, bookkeeping, tax services, and access to a thriving community, all in one integrated platform. We believe in empowering self-employed people to enjoy the same tax savings that big companies get, so they can focus on their passion, not paperwork. Featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo, Bloomberg, Financial Times, TechCrunch, and more. We are backed by General Catalyst, Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), QED Investors, Google’s Gradient Ventures, Expa, and other investors who have financed iconic companies like YouTube, Substack, Twitch, Box, Hims, Instacart, and Lyft. About the role: The AI in an AI-native financial services firm is only as good as the operation it learns from, and the operation is only as good as the team that designs and tests it. That's Strategic Operations, and as Head of the function you own it. You'll report to the Head of Member Operations and partner closely with Product Operations (who owns the standards) and Service Operations (who runs the floor). Strategic Operations is the design layer in between: the applied operations research function with the technical muscle to model, prototype, and instrument the operation directly. You'll lead a small, high-leverage team designing the workflows of a self-driving financial back office, at the leading edge of an industry being rebuilt around outcomes rather than tools. What you'll do: - Own the design of every Member Operations workflow as a productized funnel: structured inputs, orchestrated execution, automated feedback loops, measurable quality, SLA-bound delivery. - Own the Operations Intelligence Warehouse, the data layer that makes throughput, quality, variance, and capacity inspectable and decision-ready. - Implement statistical process control across all production workflows, replacing anecdote with evidence. - Build queuing and capacity models that drive staffing decisions and surface bottlenecks before they break the operation. - Encode standards into Policy-as-Code: automated enforcement of bookkeeping quality gates, tax scorecards, and AI exception logic. - Lead the prototype-to-Engineering handoff. Use low-code and AI-assisted development to ship working operating models in days or weeks, validate them with floor data, and graduate stable designs to Engineering. Build bridge tools, not forever tools. - Build and lead a small team of operations analysts, process architects, and tool builders. Hire generalists who can model, design, and prototype. What you'll bring: - 10+ years in operations strategy, applied operations research, industrial process engineering, or ops management at a high-volume service business. Financial services, fintech, marketplace, or logistics backgrounds are particularly well-aligned. - A management-science mindset: throughput, utilization, queuing, variance, cycle time, and first-pass yield are your native vocabulary. - Deep SQL and data modeling skill (BigQuery preferred). You write the queries and design the schemas yourself. - Hands-on fluency with low-code and AI-assisted application development (AppSheet, Retool, Bolt, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar). You ship working tools yourself and expect the same of your team. - Workflow and process design experience, including BPMN or equivalent. You think about operations as a flow, not a list of tasks. - Strong analytics chops across SPC, root cause, capacity modeling, and variance analysis. - A clear point of view on scaffolding vs. product. You know when to build a quick instrument, when to lobby for a roadmap item, and when to retire a tool you built last quarter. You ship operating reality, not abstract designs. - Strong cross-functiona ... (truncated, view full listing at source)