For the 2018-19 school year, Newsela will be putting increased focus on its community of educators and school administrators and the Community Team will be central to these efforts. We want all educators to see Newsela as a crucial and integral part of their instructional work, not just a tool that they will use occasionally in their classrooms. New teams have been created within Community to focus on engagement and curriculum alignment for its PRO Customers The reorganization of the Community team will also involve a reorganization of workflow, with all operations centralized into a new group: Community Operations.

The Community Operations Director will bring a new focus to the team that will ensure we are responsive to all teachers in a highly productive but also highly efficient manner, leveraging automation, best practices to create operational processes that are first class. You will be primarily responsible for building a team of operations managers and staff that will track everything we do as a team and instill a culture of constant improvement. You will work closely with the other leaders in Community and across the organization, in particular Account Management within Sales, Product Marketing, and the Product Managers within the Product team.

The successful candidate is a natural leader, is organized, detail oriented, entrepreneurial and loves working with educators and non-educators alike. You are ready to help us scale our capabilities at a fast rate, doubling operational capacity in the first six months. You will lead a team that will take over all Community operations, including support operations, provisioning and all teacher support, along with troubleshooting, data analysis, email outreach for onboarding and engagement, and all reporting.

You will lead a team of education technology innovators that will operate at the pace and quality of the very best and most admired SaaS companies and will be critical to Newsela’s overall success in its mission to unlock the written word for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Be a leader by example at a fast-growing education company.
• Work with management teams within and outside of Community to fulfill Newsela’s overall company goals.
• Create recruitment strategy to find the very best operations and analytics staff.
• Create efficient workflows to maximize output without ever sacrificing quality.
• Track and report all activities and build a culture of constant improvement through the Community operations team, as well as the entire Community team.
• Develop a set of KPIs that are aligned to company goals and to assure the Community teams remain focused on constant improvement.
• Manage outsource vendors including temps and operations/business consultants,
• Work with Newsela Operations and Finance teams to oversee smooth and accurate payments to vendors.
• Oversee and coordinate all systems support tools, including not not limited to SalesForce, Zendesk, Django, Looker, and online chat.

The Ideal Candidate

• Bachelor’s Degree
• 5+ years working in operations environments, preferably at revenue- and growth-focused companies.
• 2+ years operations management expertise
• Demonstrated project management experience.
• Proven knowledge of CRM tools including SalesForce.
• Demonstrated experience developing, training and mentoring a high performing community operations team

Some Plusses Include

• Master’s degree
• Excellent communication, relationship building, and interpersonal skills
• Community and customer service experience.
• Experience working at a fast-growing start-up, preferably in SaaS.
• Understanding of the challenges of teachers and school administrators.
• Organized and able to thrive in a fast-paced environment.
• Entrepreneurial, proactive and takes initiative.
• Comfortable with technology and able to select and implement various software tools.
• Experience using Data analytics tools (Looker)
• Familiar with K12 Education