The Role

Every department in this company reports to the founder today. That is why this role exists.

As COO you own the internal engine end to end: how work enters the business, how it moves through delivery, and whether it comes out the other side at the quality we promised. The founder moves to strategy, capital and external growth. You take everything else.

This is not a caretaker role for a machine that already runs. Several of the departments you will own do not have a manual, a metric or in some cases a manager. You are being hired to build those, in order, while the current volume keeps flowing.
What You'll Do

Take the operating load. Become the person the company runs through, so the founder is not the escalation point for eight departments.

Own throughput and the quality that comes with it. We need to multiply the number of people we take through our delivery pipeline each week without the failure rate rising. Both halves of that sentence are the job.

Build the operating cadence. A weekly meeting structure with real accountability, quarterly goals with named owners, and a company scorecard of eight to twelve numbers. Most of those numbers do not exist yet. You will define them and then make them true.

Write the operating manual. We have almost no documented processes. You will map the core ones, get them written down, and cut how long it takes a new hire to become useful.

Make quality measurable. Nothing in the business currently logs mistakes. You will change that across delivery, support and review, and use what it tells you.

Consolidate the tooling. Real-time visibility of the whole business in one place, rather than the several disconnected systems people half-trust today.

Hire and keep operators. Several senior seats are open and more are coming. The quality of the people underneath you is the ceiling on everything above.

Open new markets. Two geographic expansions are in flight. The blocker on both is operational, not technical.

Requirements

• You have scaled a delivery organization from tens of people to hundreds, and you can talk about what broke on the way
• You have owned a P&L, or operated close enough to one to be accountable for unit economics
• You are a systems thinker. You see the business as connected loops and you go to work on the actual constraint rather than the loudest complaint
• You reach for process and automation before you reach for headcount
• You are a strong, direct writer. Half of this job is making a decision legible to people who were not in the room
• You hold a high bar and you have hired people who hold it too
• You have the emotional intelligence to restructure a department without losing the people in it
• You are comfortable with ambiguity, unglamorous work, and a business that is still deciding some things about itself

Bonus Points For

• High-volume logistics, gig-economy platform operations, fintech or KYC onboarding, or manufacturing throughput
• Multi-state or cross-border operations
• Having run a formal operating system such as EOS, and being pragmatic rather than religious about it
• Strategy and operations consulting background paired with real line experience
• Interest in startups, investing, alternative markets, or behavioral strategy

Benefits

• A genuine number two seat with real authority, not a title
• Competitive cash compensation
• Direct partnership with the founder, no layers
• Build the operating system of a company from the ground up
• Flexible location and hours