Business Operations
Posted Updated
Palo Alto, hybrid preferred. US-Remote considered for candidates who are exceptionally well-fit or referred. Reports to the CEO. $100k - 150k base + 0.25-0.5% equity. Hiring now.
If you know someone at Shorebird, ask them to refer you. Past startup experience highly valued.
Shorebird is building the best way to write mobile apps.
Our founder and CEO, Eric, started Flutter at Google. And now we’re building the next generation of mobile development. Thousands of developers already use Shorebird every month to ship to 100s of millions of devices. Over 1k businesses subscribe, including some of the largest brands across the globe.
Why now? We’ve built a working business over the last 3.5 years, mostly as 3 people. We just closed another round with our existing investors and have scaled to 7. We have over 2.5 years of runway remaining and are close to profitable at our current size. Agents are shaking up mobile development, and we’re one of very few companies that ships a complete toolchain, so we have a real shot at making a big difference. We’re still early, and a long way from our vision. We need someone owning operations, centralized and done well, rather than squeezed into the CEO’s overflow time, to let us scale further.
This job
We try to spend all of our efforts building for and talking to customers. Yet we’re big enough to have non-trivial operational complexity (procurement/billing, contracts, filings, compliance paperwork, off-sites/events, etc). Right now, most of that work is spread across the team.
We are looking for someone who wants to learn how a company of this size runs from the inside. Eric (CEO) is your main resource while you learn it. You will see the revenue, contracts, hiring, all the real numbers and end up owning whole areas of the business.
At a first approximation, anything the business needs to do that isn’t talking to customers or building the product should probably be yours to own, systematize and execute. You being here allows the business to operate and scale.
Insurance is an example. We sign a contract that requires more coverage than we carry, or we enter a new state, and someone has to notice, work out what we need, get a quote, and execute. We have vendors for many of these, but someone has to own the vendors, and “just do” in all the places where we can’t use an agent or outsource.
You will use a lot of agents, and build your own systems. Not because we mandate AI (we don’t), but because it’s the only way to run a global business at our size.
What you’ll work on
You’re the one who knows the state of the domains you own; you escalate when you need to. Examples:
Money. You own the monthly close with our accountants. You review the numbers before Eric does and are part of sign-off. You run Ramp, card budgets, taxes and insurance. We have vendors to help with this (international taxes, state filings, virtual mailbox), but you manage them and do the work where they don’t or can’t.
Contracts and compliance. You own all our vendor relationships: tooling, recruiters, leases, insurance, anything that’s not a customer. That means making sure they all have the right cards, get paid on time, and that we know who owns each account. You’ll see a lot of contracts, vendor and customer both, and you’ll likely get to know our lawyer well. You own the process and vendor side of compliance: our ISO 27001 audit is nearly done and a vendor runs the program day to day; you take over that relationship and the annual audit.
Company rhythm. Eric sets the pace, you beat the drum. You own the weekly cross-functionals, all-hands, metrics reviews, quarterly offsites, vendor renewals and compliance dates. The quarterly offsite is the biggest of these: venue, travel, agenda and budget for the whole team, four times a year.
People, hiring, places. You own onboarding and offboarding: accounts, equipment, access, paperwork. Payroll and benefits run in Rippling, and our handbook is public. We plan to hire several people over the next 12 months, you'll help us build and run that system (personally, through tools, agents, and vendors). We have a small office in Palo Alto today, if we continue to hire more locally we'll likely hunt for a new lease, which you'll own.
See our handbook for how we work.
Is this you?
Stage: 2+ years working experience. Not straight out of college. You’re not expected to have done even half of this before. You do need to have done some, but what matters is your learning rate and your ability to hold a lot of stuff on your plate. This job gets bigger as fast as you can carry it, and what it becomes is up to you. We’re a small company and only need enough process to get our jobs done today. Doers wanted.
- You operate well with little structure. There is no legal department, no HR department, no finance team, and no more-senior operations person to learn from (we can help you build a network of others in similar roles). Often there is a credit card and a mandate, and you build the structure yourself. You’ll be the expert on our operations, and you’ll both have to (and get to) figure it out as you go.
- Own a long list. Make sure things don't fall off it. When you take things, we know they get done.
- You’ve used agents for non-trivial work and want to more.
- You write clearly and are comfortable with numbers.
- You have a reason to want this job in particular. You don’t have to have worked at a developer tools company, but we need you to want to work at this one.
What your first months look like:
First day. Meet everyone. We walk through every system the company runs on. Get you access to everything. We get you access to GitHub and you have Claude add you to our website.
First week. You are not starting from nothing. The founding employee who ran much of ops left runbooks for much of what recurs, and Eric can hand over the rest himself. You spend a while reading them, and you start building a list of what happens when.
First month. A lot of this month is working a list, from Eric and from the handoff docs, and most of it will be things you’ve never had to deal with. A real example: exit the state of Illinois (one of 7 states we’re registered in), probably mostly by emailing Rippling, but also figure out why IL thinks Rippling paid the wrong amount on taxes, and let our insurance providers know we’ve left the state. That’s four systems and a few emails and hours (and chats with Claude to figure it out), but there will be dozens of oddball things that crop up over the next quarter. You’ve probably taken over our weekly cross-functional, you have an operating calendar we can all see/use, you’ve taken over our ISO vendor relationship, and you’re the billing owner on every vendor account we have.
First quarter. Several of the listed areas you now run day-to-day on your own. You’re bringing issues to Eric, more often than the other way around. You’ve planned and run our next offsite end to end.
First year. You’ve taken most of the list, and probably various things we didn’t anticipate, either because the need arose or because you found them interesting. The job has grown with us, the exact direction is up to you and your interests and ambition.
Logistics
Benefits. Health, dental, and vision; 401(k) with a 4% match; paid time off; the equipment you need. Details are in our handbook.
Work authorization. We will consider visa sponsorship on a case by case basis.
Shorebird is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.