The Role;
You will operate as the CEO's partner in building the company: owning the operational vision, driving ruthless prioritization, shaping the product from the front lines, motivating the team, and architecting the systems, culture, and execution rhythms that define how Abode runs.
Abode is an AI-powered services business, so the scope is wider than a conventional ops seat. The person who owns the operation also owns the property tax product it powers. You will not inherit a machine and maintain it. You will build it, and you will build the team that runs it.
Why This Role• A founding seat atop the AI-native platform for a hidden part of the economy. Property tax touches every one of the 80M+ homeowners in America, and the vast majority never appeal because the process is opaque, county by county, and built to be ignored. Billions in overpayment, no platform incumbent, and a live revenue beachhead already in hand.
• Proven demand. Live customers and the credibility of most startups spend years trying to buy, plus $23M Series A from Permanent Capital, Drive Capital, Sequoia, Core VC and The 81 Collection.
What You'll Do• Build and lead the ops team. Hire, develop, and manage ops managers and a contractor bench of 20+. Set the bar, build the cadence, and create a team where people own outcomes instead of tasks.
• Lead 0-to-1 market launches. Take new states and counties from regulatory ambiguity to live operations, building the playbooks, workflows, and systems that make the next launch faster than the last.
• Own operations end to end. Appeals filing, market launches, contractor network, quality, and throughput. You own the metrics (cost per appeal, filing accuracy, cycle time, win rate) and the decisions that move them.
• Design the systems that replace manual work. Partner with engineering to automate what shouldn't be human. Turn customer pain, contractor workflows, and county edge cases into clear product requirements, and hold the line on what ships.
• Own operational unit economics. Build the models, run the analysis, and make the calls on where we spend, where we automate, and where we walk away. Data is the tiebreaker, so bring the numbers.
Who You Are• You've led operations at a seed or Series A startup and built something from nothing, not just run a team someone else designed.
• You're a natural owner who thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and doesn't wait for permission.
• You've hired, managed, and developed people, and you know the difference between managing a team and building one.
• You are biased toward action and unafraid to get your hands dirty. At this stage, the Head of Operations still files the appeal when it needs filing.
• You are low-ego and high-accountability. Your work, not your volume, builds your reputation.
Basic Qualifications• You're in Austin or willing to relocate. We're in-person 4 days a week.
• 10+ years in operations, consulting, banking, product, or early-stage startups, including operational leadership at a seed or Series A company.
• 5+ years managing people, with a track record of hiring and developing a team.
Our Core ValuesThe biggest thing we pride ourselves on is autonomy. You can't move fast through committee decision-making, so we hire people who want to own workstreams outright.
- Take ownership. This is yours. We build everything through single-threaded autonomy. One person owns the outcome, makes the calls, and sees it through. We believe in "asking for forgiveness, not permission" so you can make unencumbered decisions.
- Move fast. Decide. Ship. Learn. Repeat. Speed is our edge. Perfection is the enemy of momentum. We will forever move faster than our competition.
- Be resourceful. Find ways to do more with less. Constraints don't slow us down. They make us inventive. There's always a way through, and the people who own their work find it. "That's not my job" isn't a sentence anyone here finishes.
- Think big and challenge convention. Dare to do things differently. You don't change the world with incrementally better solutions. The systems we're fixing are broken because everyone accepted them. We question the default, build the better answer, and refuse to blend in.
- Measure everything. Data is the tiebreaker. We turn instincts into evidence, hunches into experiments, and opinions into numbers. If we can measure it, we can beat it.
