Director Strategic Business Operations

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. Substack empowers independent writers, artists, videographers, podcasters, and creators of all types to create, share, and make a living off their work through subscriptions, while offering them creative freedom, ownership, and a direct connection to their audiences.

We are looking for an exceptional, high-leverage Business Operations leader to serve as a strategic co-pilot to our CEO and CFO.

This is not a pure strategy seat, a deck-building role, or traditional corporate management. We are looking for an "athlete": someone with elite analytical rigor, a first-principles mindset, and the hands-on drive to build data pipelines, run complex business analyses, and personally execute high-stakes initiatives across the company.

You will sit at the center of Substack’s business—identifying bottlenecks, uncovering growth drivers, optimizing creator and reader economics, and building the operating infrastructure that scales our business.

At Substack, you’ll work directly alongside our founders and executive leadership team to shape the future of independent publishing and media. You’ll have a front-row seat—and a hands-on steering wheel—in scaling the business.

Responsibilities

• Strategic & Operational Execution: Uncover, prioritize, and drive the business’s highest-impact initiatives across product, growth, pricing, and creator economics.

• Data-Driven Business Insights: Get hands-on keyboard with our data. Perform deep-dive analyses on core metrics (e.g., creator churn, reader LTV, network monetization, conversion funnels) to guide product and monetization decisions.

• External & Market Intelligence: Conduct rigorous competitive analysis, market mapping, and strategic positioning to evaluate new opportunities, industry shifts, and expansion vectors.

• Executive Decision Support: Partner directly with the CEO and CFO to translate complex operational data into clear, actionable executive decisions and board-level strategy.

• Management Infrastructure: Design and run our business cadence—KPI tracking, operational reviews, cross-functional alignment, and objective-setting—keeping the executive team in sync and operating with discipline.

• Team Building & Leadership: Lead and mentor a lean team of operators as Substack scales, while remaining willing and eager to do the frontline analytical work yourself.

About You

• Elite Foundation: 5–10 years of total work experience, including foundational years at a top-tier management consulting firm (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) or investment bank (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs), followed by high-impact BizOps/Strategy experience at a fast-growing tech company. Top-tier undergraduate or MBA (HBS, Stanford, Wharton, etc.) preferred.

• Hands-on Analytics: Highly comfortable with quantitative modeling and data manipulation (advanced SQL, Excel/financial modeling, Python/R a plus). You don’t ask a team to pull numbers for you—you dig into the database yourself.

• First-Principles Problem Solver: You break down complex, messy problems into clear hypotheses and actionable frameworks before writing code or pulling data.

• Bias for Action & Execution: You don't stop at giving recommendations or making slides. You own implementation end-to-end, rolling up your sleeves to change operational realities.

• Low Ego, High Ownership: You act like an owner. You care deeply about solving the right problems for creators and readers, regardless of whether a task falls neatly into your job description.

• Executive-Level Communication: Concise, direct, and persuasive—able to influence senior executives, engineers, and creative partners alike without relying on corporate jargon.

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $200,000 - $300,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

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