Why This Role Matters
Our founders focus on sales, marketing, and vision. Our service leaders focus on client delivery. But for the agency to scale, we need a Senior Operations Manager / Head of Operations to own and build the backbone across HR, people operations, systems and processes etc.
This role ensures the agency runs smoothly, profitably, and compliantly, freeing the rest of the leadership team to focus on clients and growth.
This role is primarily about building and enforcing the operational infrastructure of the company, rather than being client-facing, but there will be some rarer occasions where client contact is required such as handling larger legal/contract discussions with clients, billing disagreements, or overseeing the billing/termination processes for more complex/larger clients (either handled yourself or through an assistant). Finance is less of a part of this role as we have a CFO you'll work alongside, but if you are financially literate that is a bonus.
Core Areas You'll Own:
* Ensuring we can hire the people we need when we need them.
* Ensuring our team member retention is high, team members are engaged, and team attrition remains low.
* Ensuring we have task management and project management systems built across every department (eg ClickUp), ensuring we have clear task ownership and employee utilization clearly tracked and measured.
* Ensuring clear data and key business metrics are tracked accurately and are available to the founders, from all areas across the company.
* Ensuring we have a clear SOP library in place, adopted across the company.
* Ensuring accounts receivable (AR) is low and is being collected quickly.
What You'll Be Doing
1. HR, People Ops & Capacity/Resource Planning (Top Priority Along With #2 - Must Have Extensive Experience)
* Build and manage a clear recruiting system inside an ATS, ensuring data tracking and visibility at every stage of the recruiting and hiring pipeline.
* Manage and lead our recruiter to run job descriptions, interview processes, and scorecards (alongside service leaders).
* Work between our service delivery team to define current capacity, and work with our sales team to forecast our sales pipeline, and decide when and who to hire (Ciaran will assist closely in these decisions at first if needed).
* Oversee the recruiting process and pipeline with our recruiter to ensure strong time-to-hire goals are met. The goal is ensuring new hires are not sat idle (i.e. are hired too early), but not hired too late (i.e. we are over capacity / are forced to have a waitlist). This area of the role can be intense at times, and you must excel in a fast-paced high-growth environment.
* Design onboarding processes (alongside service leaders) to ensure every new hire has a world-class first 30–60 days.
* Build and enforce performance review frameworks, compensation bands, and progression paths.
* Act as a leader and enforcer for people management - assist with PIPs, disciplinaries, and sensitive team member conversations where needed.
* Implement retention and culture initiatives that make Linear a best-in-class place to work and ensure high team member retention.
2. ClickUp/PM Software, SOPs, Systems (Top Priority Along With #1 - Must Have Extensive Experience)
* Talk to service leaders and team members to understand what processes they are following now (even if those processes are in their heads), and turn them into clear process maps.
* Then build these processes inside ClickUp with every part of the process having clear tasks assigned to people inside ClickUp so these processes are followed.
* From this, ensuring we have clear task ownership and that we can track team member utilization clearly across each department (service delivery team, HR team, finance ops team, client onboarding, etc)
* Lead the adoption of and maintain the SOP library across every department in the company, ensuring every process is documented and followed.
* Proactively assist in ensuring SOP usage across the agency; training the managers and team in and supporting in writing, reviewing, and enforcing SOPs.
* Provide feedback and instructions in a positive, leadership-driven way to ensure SOPs are lived out daily.
3. Client Billing, AR & Client Contract Terminations
* Manage an operations assistant to handle client billing through the billing email, including issuing invoices, tracking payments, and escalating overdue invoices.
* At times, speak directly with clients on billing matters (e.g., large concerns, billing setup changes, payment confirmations, or to explain billing processes clearly if there is confusion).
* Oversee contract terminations - e.g. ensuring client exits are handled according to the contract, any final amounts that are owed are calculated and billed correctly, and handling client exits by emailing directly with the client (or training a team member to do this).
4. Tracking Key Business Metrics & Providing Strategic Support to Execs
* Provide key business metrics to the founders to inform strategic decisions.
* Forecast headcount needs in partnership with service leaders.
* Build and run systems for tracking data across the entire company: from outreach-to-hire funnel metrics, to service KPIs (revision rates, time-to-first-creative), to finance (AR % outstanding), to sales (lead-to-close rate), and client-level data (churn per service, churn by client type).
* Be obsessed with surfacing insights and patterns in the data that reveal the best growth paths for the agency.
* Continuously identify bottlenecks and streamline workflows to improve speed and efficiency.
5. Legal / Compliance / IT / Admin
* Standardize and enforce both client and team contracts, NDAs, non-competes, and IP clauses (we are not expecting you to be a lawyer here - we can give you access to a legal council - instead we are expecting you to be detail oriented and cautious where it is right to be cautious and work to ensure we are compliant - you will have support from our execs in this)
* Oversee disputes, collections, or contract updates (again, with a legal council if needed and support from our execs)
* Oversee IT/security basics (password management, access control, privacy compliance).
* Audit and optimize the agency's tool stack for cost-efficiency and productivity.
Success Metrics
Metrics may include, but are not limited to:
* Recruiting funnel visibility and time-to-hire performance.
* Onboarding experience ratings (new hire feedback/NPS).
* Billing accuracy, overdue invoice management, and collections.
* ClickUp and SOP adoption across teams.
* Team member retention and progression tracking.
* Consistent weekly/monthly reporting cadence across all company metrics.
Ideal Candidate
* 5-10+ years in operations leadership within a remote company (agency preferred, 50+ people).
* Proven experience across HR (recruiting and onboarding), ClickUp or PM buildout, systems and processes, and finance operations.
* Strong recruiting operations and ATS management experience.
* Track record of implementing structure in a fast-paced, growing company.
* Hands-on builder who thrives in execution (not just strategy).
* Data-obsessed: proven ability to build reporting systems, dashboards, and insights that drive decisions (very important)
* Detail-oriented, proactive, and comfortable handling uncomfortable conversations (eg collections, PIPs, disciplinaries).
* Strong project management, delegation, and systems thinking skills.
Career Growth Potential
* Growth Potential: For the right candidate, this role has a clear progression path into an even more senior role depending on performance and contribution.
* Executive accountability: You'll not only build systems but if you are capable enough you will have the opportunity to lead even further as you take more and more from our existing founders' plates.
* Leadership seat: Expect a voice at the leadership table, partnering with the founders to shape the agency's strategy and operational direction.
* Scale with us: As the agency grows 3-4x in size, there is potential to evolve from a builder role into a deeper executive position, with the chance to design and oversee an operations team beneath you (provided you are senior enough and can handle the right responsibilities).
Why Join Linear
* Impact: You'll build the operational backbone of a fast-growing agency with big ambitions.
* Growth: Be part of a team scaling toward $10M+/year and beyond, with a leadership seat at the table.
* Progression: Over the next 12 months, this role has huge potential to progress into a VP and/or COO position for the right candidate.
* Autonomy: You'll own your domain end-to-end and be trusted to execute.
* Culture: Work with driven founders and a young, ambitious, global team.
Compensation: Competitive salary depending on experience.
Start Date: ASAP
If you're a builder who loves creating clarity from chaos, scaling operations for growth, and finding answers in the data - we'd love to meet you.