Director of Operations

Work Hours: Mon to Fri; 9 AM to 5 PM, San Francisco Time
Location of Search: Latin America and Philippines
Work Location: REMOTE

Client Overview

We are a fast-growing startup reinventing one of the world’s oldest industries — book publishing. Today, authors face extreme gatekeeping, low discoverability, and minimal profit from traditional publishers or Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem. We are building a direct-to-consumer publishing engine, treating books the way modern brands treat cosmetics or ecommerce products — with data-driven marketing, affiliate-driven distribution, and real-time performance insights.

The mission: Help great ideas reach the world, and give authors the visibility and commercial success they cannot achieve through traditional channels. This role sits at the center of that mission.

Role Overview

This is not a keep-the-machine-running job. It is a design-and-build-the-machine job, and you will operate as a true partner to the CEO. The company runs on a written Ops Execution Framework: roughly 60 recurring SOPs across four storefront brands, each with a designated priority, an SLA, and a defined escalation path — covering customer support, returns and refunds, marketplace compliance and appeals, supplier and fulfillment reconciliation, and creator/sample operations. You will own this framework end to end. Your mandate:

Propose and implement the ops structure for our next phase of growth. Take us from ~$7.5M toward $25M+ ARR without breaking. You bring proposals and systems, not status reports.
Drive the delegation waterfall. Every SOP moves through three stages: the Director owns and documents it → an analyst runs it independently → a supervised AI workflow runs it. Your success is measured by how fast processes move down this waterfall so human time concentrates on judgment and exceptions.
Integrate AI deeply into workflows. You will personally build and deploy agentic workflows (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity Super Computer, browser agents, scripts, automation platforms) and set the standard for the team. Headcount stays lean because automation does the volume.
Build and manage a lean offshore team. You inherit an ops analyst and dev support; you will hire, train, and performance-manage additional lean offshore hires as the automation roadmap demands — owning SLAs, quality, and escalation paths.

What you’ll own day to day

P0, SLA-bound work: customer-facing platform support chats, returns/refunds, violation and shop-performance-score appeals — the work that directly gates revenue and shop health.
Order lifecycle and fulfillment: distributor and print-on-demand order submission, 3PL coordination, order-error triage and resubmission, tracking sweeps.
Supplier and financial hygiene: credit reconciliation with distributors and 3PLs, defective-goods claims, chargeback appeals.
Creator and sample operations: sample approvals, eligibility configuration, target-collaboration invitations, creator communications.
Vendor and partner management: publisher wholesale accounts, distributor relationships, 3PL selection.
Reporting and cadence: KPI dashboards, weekly ops sync with the CEO, error and violation logs.
Documentation: a written SOP, a screen recording, and (once stable) an AI workflow file for every process — a known gap you will close quickly.

What you’ll build as we expand

The framework above covers today’s machine. Expansion means half the job is building what doesn’t exist yet — and you own the front edge:

Net-new SOPs: when a new channel, partner, product line, or recurring problem appears, you design the process from zero — write the SOP, set its priority and SLA, run it yourself until it is stable, then drive it down the waterfall to the analyst and to an AI workflow.
Partner sourcing and selection: as fulfillment scales, you field offers from 3PLs, run structured evaluations (pricing, SLAs, test shipments, references), negotiate terms, and pick the winners — and you do the same for new print and publishing partners as we release our own titles.
New platform integration: when we enter a new marketplace or social-commerce channel, you stand up operations end to end — account setup, catalog and inventory integration, fulfillment routing, platform compliance — then codify it into SOPs the team and agents can run without you.

Who you are

5+ years in operations, including 2+ years leading ops for an e-commerce or marketplace business (TikTok Shop, Amazon, Shopify, or Temu seller-side experience strongly preferred).
Demonstrably AI-fluent: you use LLMs daily, you have personally built automated workflows (LLM agents, n8n/Make/Zapier, scripts), and you can show them.
A systems builder: you write tight SOPs, define priorities and SLAs, and instrument everything you run.
Experienced building and managing distributed or offshore teams with real accountability structures.
High agency and high candor: you surface problems together with proposed solutions, you escalate with complete information, and you make defensible calls under ambiguity.
Fluent written and spoken English (C1+).

How we work — read this before applying

We are a startup in compounding growth, and we set expectations explicitly because fit matters more than anything else. The pace is faster and the hours are longer than a corporate job: this is more than 9-to-5, priorities shift, and things are chaotic relative to a big company — especially during launches, seasonal peaks, and incidents. In exchange, long hours and strong output are rewarded through real performance incentives, a direct working relationship with the CEO, genuine ownership of a function, and work on something meaningful that is growing fast. If you want predictable and calm, this is the wrong role. If you want to build, it is a great one. One hard requirement: your workday starts at 9:00 AM US Pacific (San Francisco) time aligned to US business hours.

Director of Operations - 20900