Business Operations Manager, Founders’ Office

About Ume Intelligence

Ume Intelligence is a marketing science company solving complex commercial problems for multi-location restaurant brands. We build modern analytics and automation infrastructure, paired with hands-on digital operations that turn operational data into measurable revenue.

We operate as a lean, high-leverage team with no walls between engineering and operations. We look for people who run toward technology, automation, and data models rather than away from them, and who judge their work by business impact rather than activity.

The Role

We are looking for a Business Operations Manager to work directly with our two co-founders in the Founders’ Office.

This is a high-leverage generalist role. On a given day you might schedule five candidate interviews, reconcile last month’s expenses, file a state registration, pull an enriched list of 40 restaurant groups to prospect, and research a new vendor before lunch. You will take whole areas of work off the founders’ plates, run them reliably, and turn the repeatable parts into checklists, templates, and automations so they get easier every month.

You will see the whole company up close: hiring, finance, sales, marketing, and compliance. For the right person, the role grows with the company into building and leading business operations as an executive function.

Who This Role Is For (and Not For)

• This role is for you if: You view no operational task as too small, but you never treat them as permanent manual chores—you treat them as systems to streamline, automate, and document. You take genuine pride in zero dropped balls, meticulous back-office execution, and returning hours of time to executive leadership.

• This role is not for you if: You are looking for a purely advisory/strategy consulting seat, or conversely, a traditional executive assistant role centered around personal calendar coordination. This is hands-on operational infrastructure building across legal, finance, recruiting, and GTM.

What You’ll Own

• Recruiting Coordination: Run our applicant pipeline end-to-end in our ATS: candidate communication, interview scheduling across time zones, scorecard hygiene, and follow-ups. Prepare offer paperwork and drive new hire onboarding and offboarding workflows.

• Bookkeeping & Back-Office Finance: Categorize transactions, issue and chase customer invoices, coordinate bills and receipts, and prepare clean month-end closes for our external accounting firm.

• Government & Compliance Paperwork: Track and prepare state and local filings, annual reports, registrations, business licenses, and tax notices. Coordinate directly with our registered agent, CPA, and payroll provider so nothing is ever late or non-compliant.

• Remote Office & Vendor Management: Manage software subscriptions, seat provisioning, access permissions, hardware/equipment, and our virtual mailbox. Audit tools regularly, negotiate vendor contracts, and cut unused subscriptions.

• GTM Research & Lead Enrichment: Research prospective multi-unit restaurant groups and regional enterprise brands. Build, enrich, and verify qualified lead directories, keep the CRM clean, and draft initial outreach templates for the founders.

• Marketing Operations Support: Maintain campaign calendars, assemble client-facing and internal metrics reports from our data tools, schedule content, and keep digital brand assets organized.

• Executive & Business Research: Investigate open-ended questions quickly and synthesize them into crisp 1-page briefs: a competitor’s product model, a market landscape, a regulatory filing nuance, or a vendor pricing benchmark.

• Systematization & Automation: Document every workflow you touch into reusable runbooks, and proactively deploy modern AI and automation tools (Zapier/Make, prompt chains) to eliminate manual administration.

Your First 90 Days

• Day 30: You fully own candidate scheduling and the month-end bookkeeping close. You maintain a living calendar of every recurring corporate filing, tax date, and subscription renewal, eliminating dropped balls across back-office operations.

• Day 60: You own vendor and subscription management, and you have built our baseline restaurant prospecting directory (multi-unit operators across target regions) with verified decision-maker data.

• Day 90: You have standardized an operational playbook: an end-to-end employee onboarding checklist, automated receipt-matching workflows, and routine operational reporting that runs without founder intervention. The founders spend measurably less time on administrative drag.

Our Operational Stack

• Productivity & Workspace: Google Workspace, Notion / Markdown docs, Slack, Zoom

• Finance & Compliance: QuickBooks Online / Xero, Gusto / Deel, Virtual Mailbox

• Pipeline & Operations: Modern ATS (e.g., Ashby, Dover, Greenhouse), CRM / Prospecting tools (Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator)

• Automation & AI: ChatGPT / Claude (daily research, data extraction, drafting), Zapier / Make

What You Bring

Experience & Background

• 3 to 6 years of experience in business operations, a founder’s/CEO’s office, a high-ownership executive operational role, or early-stage startup operations.

• Hands-on bookkeeping fluency with tools such as QuickBooks or Xero. You understand the fundamentals of reconciliations, invoicing, expense categorization, and cash management.

• Full-cycle recruiting operations experience, from managing applicant pipelines to scheduling panels and preparing offer packets.

• A degree in business, finance, economics, communications, or equivalent practical track record.

Core Competencies & Must-Haves

• Extreme Reliability: When an operational item is on your plate, it gets done accurately on schedule without reminders. You surface bottlenecks early.

• Judgment & Discretion: Absolute discretion and integrity handling confidential legal, payroll, financial, and executive communications.

• AI & Tool Fluency: You don’t just use AI to write emails—you actively use LLMs and workflow automations to parse unstructured data, research edge cases, draft documentation, and systematically eliminate manual steps.

• Written Clarity: Impeccable, clear, and concise written English. You can turn fragmented founder thoughts into a structured checklist, a one-page briefing doc, or a polished external email.

• Autonomous Resourcefulness: You run to ground unfamiliar questions—whether a complex state registration rule, a vendor contract clause, or a restaurant group’s VP of Marketing—without needing a predefined roadmap.

Nice to Have

• Practical knowledge of US corporate compliance (Delaware filings, California state registrations, payroll/tax compliance).

• Background or strong familiarity with the food & beverage, hospitality, or multi-location retail sector.

• Prior experience working in a fully distributed, asynchronous startup team.

Working Schedule & Rhythm

• Structure: Full-time, flexible schedule.

• Core Overlap: A consistent daily window of at least 2 to 3 hours overlapping with the founders between 7:00 AM and 11:00 AM US Pacific for daily syncs, real-time unblocking, and candidate coordination, with asynchronous flexibility for the remainder of your day.

How Performance Is Measured

• Reliability: 100% on-time execution for compliance filings, billing, vendor payments, candidate touchpoints, and month-end closes.

• Founder Leverage: Concrete reduction in executive hours spent on administrative overhead and operational friction.

• Work Quality: High accuracy across the general ledger, compliance docs, and prospect research; minimal rework required.

• Compounding Efficiency: Number of recurring processes converted into documented playbooks, templates, or software automations.

What We Offer

• Competitive Full-Time Compensation: Stable, competitive monthly base salary.

• Meaningful Equity Participation: Stock option grant with real upside in a high-leverage US enterprise company.

• Paid Time Off & Holidays: Generous paid annual leave and public holidays.

• Total Executive Transparency: Direct visibility into the entire operational, strategic, and financial machinery of an early-stage company.

• Clear Career Trajectory: Opportunity to define and lead business operations as Ume expands.

Our Interview Process

1. Introductory Screen (30 mins): High-level conversation covering your background, communication style, working rhythm, and scope alignment.

2. Practical Work Trial (Take-home, ~60–90 mins): A realistic exercise mirroring a typical morning in the Founders’ Office (e.g., reconciling a messy expense ledger, answering an ambiguous vendor research prompt, and drafting a candidate coordination brief).

3. Founders Deep Dive (45 mins): In-depth discussion on problem-solving, operational judgment, automation philosophy, and mutual team fit.