Director of Strategic Business Operations, Substack
BizOps
$200-300k
Plus equity
Platform for writers & podcasters
Be an early applicant
Platform for writers & podcasters
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$200-300k
Plus equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To give thinkers, writers, and creatives the opportunity to pursue their curiosity and make money at the same time.
Role
Who you are
- Elite Foundation: 5–10 years of total work experience, including foundational years at a top-tier management consulting firm or investment bank, 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: Comfortable with quantitative modeling and data manipulation. Ideally 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 can help drive implementation end-to-end in partnership with other leaders
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Substack is an online platform for journalists and writers to manage subscription-based newsletters. It has attracted a range of users who wish to connect with their audiences in a different way to social media or ad-based models, and boasts more than 35 million subscribers.
For an industry that has seen a steady decline in its fortunes since the rise of digital, Substack is a breath of fresh air. It allows journalists to avoid the clickbait-heavy models that have dominated the last decade, and provides more freedom than its competitors. Users produce their newsletters on the site for free, charging an optional subscription fee of which Substack takes 10%.
The company continues to seek out ways to diversify its offerings, whilst securing funding rounds to expand its reach. It has also taken an outspoken approach to the AI-generated content that is taking over the internet. It already provides its users access to an AI-detection tool, and is exploring other features such as enabling users to opt out of seeing AI-generated content on their feeds altogether.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
62% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jul 2025
$100m
SERIES C
Nov 2024
$10m
ANGEL
Total funding: $200.3m
Company benefits
- Remote work support - All employees receive a generous allowance to customize their home offices
- Comprehensive health care - Substack covers 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents, and fully funds HRA plans
- Parental leave - We want employees to be fully present for the new members of their family, so we offer generous parental leave
- Flexible vacation and paid time off - You’re the best person to decide when you need a day—or a week—off to travel or decompress. Our flexible vacation policy puts you in control
- Company holidays and Winter shutdown - In addition to flexible time off, we honor 12 paid holidays annually on average. And we close the office between Christmas Eve and New Year's day to recharge each year
- Phone & internet stipends - Many of our employees work from home or on the go. So we offer full time employees a monthly stipend to cover for phone and internet costs
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Chris Best
(CEO & Co-Founder)After several software internships, they co-founded Kik Interactive in 2009, serving as CTO until 2017. At this stage, they founded Substack, and have served as CEO ever since.
Hamish McKenzie
(Chief Writing Officer & Co-Founder)Previously a journalist for several publications include The Independent and Time Out. Lead Writer for Tesla and Editorial Advisor to Kik Interactive.
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