Director of Operations 20900
Job Location:
Cape Town - South Africa
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Work Hours: Mon to Fri; 9 AM to 5 PM San Francisco Time
Location of Search: Latin America and Philippines
Work Location: REMOTE
We are a fast-growing startup reinventing one of the worlds oldest industries book publishing. Today authors face extreme gatekeeping low discoverability and minimal profit from traditional publishers or Amazons 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.
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. Flowerburst 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.
- 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.
The framework above covers todays machine. Expansion means half the job is building what doesnt 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.
- 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).
Required Experience:
Director
About Company
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