Head of Operations

About the Company

The company is the operating system for school cafeterias in Latin America. Parents load a closed-loop wallet, kids pay at the cantina, and families get full visibility into what their children eat. The company works with 550+ schools across Mexico, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina, serving 220,000+ children every month. It just closed a new funding round, is at ~US$2M ARR growing fast, and its goal is to reach 1 million children in the next 18 months. Long term, the company is building the first fintech platform for teenagers in LatAm on top of this distribution.

The team is ~35 people across Mexico City and Montevideo, with commercial teams in Chile and Argentina. The founding team is young, technical, and obsessed with capital efficiency.

Why This Role Exists

Operations has been designed but now needs to be run — and scaled. Over the past year, the product leader productized the operations area: defined the systems, the processes, and the rules of the game. The company now needs an owner who takes over that machine, runs it with granularity and rigor, builds the team around it, and scales it from US$2M to US$10M ARR. You need to ensure everything from client onboarding and platform support to internal workflows and cross-functional coordination runs with the same precision, speed, and clarity promised to schools and families. You will report directly to the CEO, and will work directly with the founding team across product, commercial, and customer success to eliminate friction at every stage of the customer journey.

The motion looks like SMB sales: short cycles (15–20 days), high volume, and a critical handoff from sales to onboarding to school go-live. That handoff — getting busy, distracted schools and cafeteria concessionaires launched fast and well — is today the single biggest operational bottleneck. Fixing and scaling it is job number one.

What You'll Own

The sales → onboarding → go-live funnel: own launch velocity and quality for every new school, and make the handoff from sales frictionless. This is the #1 priority.

The operations team: inherit, lead, grow, and raise the bar on the existing teams.

Operational KPIs: define the micro-metrics (time-to-launch, onboarding conversion, support load per school, error rates), instrument them, and review them weekly.

Automation with AI: aggressively automate repetitive workflows using AI agents and internal tooling, working with product to replace manual work with systems.

The feedback loop into product: turn operational pain into clear product requirements, so the platform keeps absorbing operational complexity.

Multi-country execution: keep operations consistent while scaling in Mexico (today ~70% of commercial effort and 300+ schools), and growing the Southern Cone.

Customer support (phase 2): the 24/7 support model for families and cafeterias will move under this role within the first 6–12 months, once the core funnel is running well.

What Success Looks Like in the First 12 Months

Time from contract signature to school go-live is measured, then cut significantly.

The sales → onboarding handoff runs on a documented, instrumented process — not on heroics.

The operations team has clear ownership, metrics, and at least one layer of leadership below you.

A meaningful share of today's manual operational work is automated with AI agents and tooling.

Operations absorbs the next wave of growth (2–3x school count) without growing headcount linearly.

Must-haves

5+ years in operations at a fast-growing tech company, including scaling operations through the ~US$1M → US$10M ARR stage (or equivalent growth)

Experience operating a high-velocity, SMB-like motion: short sales cycles, high account volume, onboarding/activation as the critical step. You have been in the mud of launches, escalations, and micro-metrics — not only designing processes from above

Track record of building and leading an operations team (hiring, developing, performance-managing)

Strong analytical rigor: you run the business on numbers at the granular level and detect where things break before they become fires

Hands-on drive to automate with AI: you are actively curious about AI agents and automation, and have used (or built) tooling to remove manual work

A bias for action and a high tolerance for ambiguity — you are energised by building, not just maintaining

Native Spanish and professional English

Willing to relocate to Mexico City and be based there most of the year (full relocation support and work permit provided). Regular presence in the company's markets and schools — this is a field-heavy role

Nice-to-haves

Experience in Mexico or scaling a LatAm multi-country operation

Background in marketplaces, delivery, fintech, or other ops-intensive tech businesses

Experience working directly with founders at seed–Series A stage