Head of Operations

Head of Operations

Richpanel · Bengaluru, India · Full-time · Posted 2026-08-30

Salary: INR 6,000,000–8,000,000

Workplace: on_site

Description

Quick highlights

• Your mission: Turn everything that already works at Richpanel into a documented, measurable, continuously improving operating system.

• Your scope: Sales, Customer Success, hiring and the financial operating rhythm. Four systems, one owner.

• Your scorecard: Sales win rate and forecast accuracy. Retention, measured as GRR. Speed and quality of hiring. Profit against plan.

• The scale: We are about 20 people and plan to more than double the business. Build the operating system before we need it.

• The catch: You will not own the results. The functional leaders do. You build the machine that makes their numbers repeatable.

• Location: Bengaluru. On-site, with the whole team.

• Reports to: CEO.

• Compensation: ₹60–80 LPA fixed, 20% target bonus, 0.5% to 1.0% ESOPs.

About Richpanel

Richpanel is the AI-native helpdesk.

Brands hire an AI support team that resolves repeat customer questions from start to finish. Their people stay in control of the moments that need judgment.

Richpanel replaces the old helpdesk and the next few support hires. The AI handles order tracking, returns, subscription changes and the repeat work that buries CX teams. Human agents handle the exceptions in the same workspace.

We are profitable, backed by Sequoia and growing 110% year over year at 8-figure ARR. We serve 3,000+ paying brands.

We built all of it with about 20 people.

About the role

That last line is the whole job.

Twenty people running a profitable, fast-growing 8-figure business is our best proof that the thing we sell actually works. It is also why almost nothing here is written down. Sales wins, and we cannot always say why. Customers renew, and we find out late when they will not. Hiring happens when the founder finds a weekend. Every one of those works today because a specific person remembers how. None of it survives the next doubling.

You are the first general manager we have hired, and the highest-priority operating hire in the company. Your job is to turn what works into a system that keeps working when the founder is not in the room.

The distinction that defines this role: the functional leaders own their numbers. You own whether the numbers are repeatable. Sales results belong to the person running Sales. You build the qualification, forecasting and coaching system underneath them, sitting in the deal reviews and the lost-deal calls until you understand the business well enough to be useful. Same in Customer Success. Same in hiring.

This is not a big-company administrator role. It is a hands-on builder of operating systems, in a company small enough that you will write the first version of every one of them yourself.

What you will own

Sales, with the leader running it

• Pitch, qualification and a definition of a real opportunity that survives a forecast call.

• Win-rate measurement that tells us why we win, not just how often.

• Deal routing, no-show recovery and winbacks.

• Forecasting we can plan headcount and spend against.

• AE coaching built on recorded calls, not opinion.

Customer Success, with the leader running it

• Onboarding and implementation that gets a customer live and getting value fast.

• Health scoring that flags a churn risk while there is still time to act.

• QBRs, renewals and expansion as a rhythm, not a scramble.

• Churn prevention and CSM coaching.

• GRR is the number. Expansion is already strong. Retention of the base is the gap.

People and hiring

• Hiring scorecards, a real interview process and interviewers trained to run it.

• Recruiting that closes the candidates we want, at pace, without lowering the bar.

• Employee onboarding and 30/60/90-day expectations per role.

• Performance management that starts a conversation in month one, not month nine.

The business

• Budgets, headcount planning and profitability guardrails. We are profitable and we intend to stay profitable while doubling.

• Dashboards that make the state of the company legible in one screen.

• The weekly operating cadence, the monthly business review and quarterly planning.

• Accountability. You are the person who asks whether the thing we committed to actually happened.

Everywhere

• Write it down. If it is not documented, it is not a system, it is a person.

• Use AI to do the work of a much larger operations team. We expect this, and we build it into how every role here works.

What this role is not

Not a policy function. Not an office or admin function. Not a program office that produces status decks about work other people did.

And not a role where you take results away from the leaders who own them. If your instinct on arriving is to run Sales yourself, this will not work. The craft here is making someone else's function repeatable without taking it over.

Requirements

You may be a fit if

• You have 10+ years in general management, business operations or chief of staff roles, including time inside a company under 200 people.

• You have built an operating system for a function you did not personally run, and the leader of that function thanked you for it.

• You have owned or shaped a P&L and made a real trade-off with it.

• You understand a B2B SaaS revenue engine well enough to be useful in a deal review: pipeline, win rate, forecast, GRR, NRR, CAC and payback.

• You have hired at pace and can state real numbers: roles closed, time to hire, offer acceptance, first-year retention.

• You write clearly. Most of your impact here will happen in writing.

• You are comfortable being the only person in your function, with no team to delegate to for the first year.

• You can tell a founder their commitment slipped, in the room, without it becoming a fight.

• You use AI daily to research, draft, analyse and move faster.

Strong signals

• You have worked at a profitable or capital-efficient company, not only a heavily funded one. The constraints are completely different.

• You have been the second person in a founder-led business and made the founder replaceable in the day to day.

• You have built a forecast that turned out to be right, and can explain what made it right.

• You have moved a retention number, and can separate what you did from what the market did.

• You are strong on numbers. You build the model yourself rather than asking finance for it.

This role is not for you if

• You need an existing team, a settled process or a finished playbook before you can start.

• You want to run Sales or CS yourself. That is a different job and we are not hiring for it.

• You avoid the conversation where you tell a senior person their number missed.

• You are uncomfortable in the detail. This role reads call recordings and rebuilds spreadsheets.

• You want to be remote. This is on-site in Bengaluru, because the job is being in the room.

Benefits

What success looks like

First 30 days

• Learn the product, the customers and exactly how the business makes money.

• Sit in on sales calls, customer demos, onboarding sessions and engineering standups.

• Map every process the company depends on and mark the ones that live in one person's head.

• Build the single dashboard that shows the state of the business.

• Bring the CEO an honest list of what breaks first at twice the size.

First 90 days

• Ship the sales operating system: qualification, deal review, forecast and win-loss.

• Ship the hiring system: scorecards, interview loops, trained interviewers, an offer process.

• Run the first quarterly planning cycle end to end, with owned and dated commitments.

• Stand up the weekly operating cadence and run it yourself.

• Have taken a meaningful set of recurring meetings off the CEO's calendar for good.

First 12 months

• The CS operating system is live: onboarding, health scoring, QBRs, renewals.

• GRR is measurably better and we can explain why.

• The forecast is close enough to plan headcount and spend against.

• Budgets, headcount plan and profitability guardrails are agreed and tracked.

• The core business runs on leaders and playbooks. The CEO is not in the operating loop.

Why join Richpanel

• The scope grows with you. This is the highest-priority hire in the company. What you own next depends on what you prove, not on a fixed ladder.

• The leverage is the point. We sell software that lets a small team do the work of a much larger one, then run the company the same way. You are building the internal version of our own product thesis.

• A business that works. You are systematizing a company that already wins, not searching for product-market fit.

• Nothing to inherit. No legacy process to defend, no committee to convince. You write the first version of everything.

• Real decision rights. You report to the CEO and you sit in the room where the company's decisions get made.

• Long-term upside. Real ownership in a company that intends to more than double.

Compensation

• Fixed salary: ₹60,00,000 to ₹80,00,000 per year, based on experience.

• Target bonus: 20% of fixed, tied to the company's operating scorecard.

• Target cash compensation: ₹72,00,000 to ₹96,00,000 per year.

• ESOPs: 0.5% to 1.0%, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. This is real ownership in a profitable company, not a token grant.

• Benefits: Paid time off, learning and development support, company offsites, health cover and the equipment you need.

How we work

• Written first. If it matters and it is not written down, it does not exist.

• Own the outcome. Not the activity, not the process, not the intention.

• Small on purpose. We add people when the leverage runs out, not before.

• Honest numbers. Report the real result, including when it misses.

• Fast loops. Ship the rough version, learn from contact with reality, then improve it.

Interview process

We aim to finish within two weeks.

1. Past-results conversation. Walk us through an operating system you built for a function you did not run. Bring the before, the after, and what the functional leader thought of it.

2. Business diagnostic. We give you a real slice of Richpanel's numbers. Tell us what is wrong, what you would fix first, and what you would deliberately leave broken.

3. Working session. Design the sales or CS operating cadence you would run here in your first 90 days.

4. Team conversations. Meet the leaders running Sales, Customer Success and Engineering. They are the people you will build with.

5. Final conversation and references. Meet the CEO. We speak with former managers, peers, and the functional leaders you have built systems for.

How to apply

Tell us:

• One operating system you built for a function you did not personally run, and the number it moved.

• The largest budget or P&L you have owned, and one trade-off you made with it.

• One time you told a founder or CEO something they did not want to hear, and what happened next.

• What you would want to look at inside Richpanel first, before changing anything.

We care more about proof and judgment than a perfect resume. Please answer the questions. Skipping them is negative evidence.

Apply

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