Founding Operations Lead

About Scout

Scout is the AI-native operating system for schools.

Our first product, Scout SIS, is a student information system (SIS). At its core, the SIS is a database for schools to store student and staff data. Every school has an SIS, but it’s one of the lowest NPS products in the history of software. Legacy players squeeze every dollar they can out of schools by locking them into long-term contracts for products that require significant hidden add-on fees to function properly. We’re trying to change that by automating complex back-office workflows across data validation, legal compliance, and government reporting.

Our mission is to give every school -- from a 3-student school in rural Kentucky to a 30,000 student district in California -- the tools that they need to help every student flourish. We're a tight-knit team that works closely with every single one of our customers to co-build a product that they can actually love.

Scout is backed by Reach Capital, Rethink Education, Y Combinator, and the founders of YC companies like Clever, SchoolMint, Coursedog, and Slash.

About the role

Right now, every operation inside this company is run by our founders. Invoicing and collections, vendor renewals, payroll and benefits, contract turnaround, recruiting logistics, insurance. It works, but it doesn't scale, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on the product.

Your job has two parts:

1. Do the work. You take all of it: finance ops, vendor and tool stack, people ops, legal ops, internal reporting. You will do this personally, with your hands, and much of it is tedious and boring.

2. Make the work disappear. We sell automation to schools, and we should run on it internally. For every recurring task you inherit, you'll figure out whether to build internal automations or buy something that does it, or redesign the process entirely so it doesn't need to happen at all, and then you'll implement it. You'll build the process. Not our engineering team or a founder — you. Using Claude Code, Codex, or one of dozens of other AI tools, you'll figure out a way to make it happen. If you've already been using tools like these, great. If not, but you're the kind of person who will have something working by the end of your first week, also great — we'll teach you.

Success will look like: six months in, the company has grown, but the amount of time spent on manually completing recurring operational tasks hasn't.

You're probably a fit if

• You have at least 2-3 years of experience in operations, business ops, chief of staff, implementation, or consulting, and you personally did the work, not just managed people who did

• You have a predisposition to building things that replace your own manual labor. A script, a Zapier chain, an Airtable base, a Retool app, a spreadsheet that did something absurd. It doesn't have to be code, but it has to have actually worked, and it has to have actually saved people time..

• Ambiguity doesn't scare you. Very few of today's operational tasks are documented — you'll be reconstructing how things actually need to work by extracting knowledge from people, Slack threads, invoices, and inboxes before you can improve any of it.

• You're willing to do the unglamorous parts. This is not a systems-design job with some ops attached, it's an ops job where you're trusted with creative direction to build your way out.

• You write clearly. The automations, SOPs, and documentation you write become how this company operates.

Nice-to-have, but not required

• Knowledge of SQL, Python, TypeScript, and/or experience with tools like Claude Code and Codex

• Having been early at a startup where nothing was set up yet

• Experience in edtech or another compliance-heavy world, like healthcare — helpful for understanding what we're building and what our team needs to get done

Compensation

We'll offer you a choice between three packages: more cash and less equity, more equity and less cash, or somewhere in the middle.

• Base: $125,000 - $150,000

• Equity: 0.1% - 0.2%

Benefits

• Great health, dental, and vision insurance

• Lunch every day, and dinner if you're here late

• Daily commuter stipend

• Gym membership near the office

• Monthly book stipend and monthly new-tool stipend, plus a real budget to buy software for the company without a procurement fight

• Regular team offsites

• Relocation stipend if you're moving to New York for this

This job is in our NYC office, five days a week, 9am to 7pm.

Hiring process

About two weeks from first call to offer.

1. 30-minute call with Noah, our CEO

2. One-hour deep dive — walk us through a system you built, in detail

3. Paid build day in our office (about six hours, $750). We give you one real internal workflow of ours and access to our tools, and you ship something that works. This is the part we weigh most heavily.

4. Two reference calls

A note on work authorization

You'll need to be authorized to work in the US. For an exceptional candidate we'll consider visa sponsorship — tell us early if that's your situation.