Product Operations Lead

Every platform runs on two things: the software you ship and the operations that keep it running. At Nectar, those two things are inseparable. When an SMS doesn't go out to a Medicaid member who was expecting a food delivery confirmation, that's not just a tech incident. It's a real person who needed something and didn't get it.

We're building fast, with a small team and a lean, agentic build pipeline. We have product leaders, designers, engineers, and a data scientist. What we don't have yet is the person whose job is to make sure the machine keeps running while we build. That's this role.

The Product Operations Lead sits at the intersection of product, quality, and platform ops. You'll own the day‑to‑day health of our platform: making sure what we ship works, catching what doesn't before it hits real users, keeping our partners and members supported, and turning recurring manual effort into automated systems. You'll also feed insight back into the product – the signals you see from the front lines of operations are some of the most valuable data we have.

There's no playbook for this yet. You'll help write it. And over time, you'll help build the orchestration layer that connects how our team works including across people, tools, and agentic systems.

Nectar connects food‑insecure Medicaid members with food pantries, nutrition programs, and community‑based organizations across Chicago and beyond. Our platform is the connective tissue between healthcare systems, community food networks, and the neighbors they both serve.

The people who depend on our platform aren't always in a position to wait out a bug or retry a failed message. When something breaks on our end, it ripples out into someone's week in a way that a glitch at a typical SaaS company simply doesn't. That's the standard we hold ourselves to – and it's the standard this role upholds.

• Monitor platform health and triage incidents when they arise. You're the person who notices the SMS failure before the customer calls.
• Handle support requests from our partners – food pantries, MCOs, community organizations – and act as a reliable, knowledgeable point of contact.
• Track open issues, elevate what needs escalating, and close the loop on resolutions.
• Build runbooks and operating procedures so that recurring situations have a clear, documented path.

• Perform user acceptance testing (UAT) on new builds before they reach real users. This is hands‑on, human‑in‑the‑loop testing, not writing automated test scripts.
• Validate that what ships matches what was spec­ed. Catch gaps, edge cases, and regressions.
• Document findings and communicate them clearly to product and engineering.
• Over time, partner with engineering to define and build out end‑to‑end automated test coverage.

• Translate product needs, partner feedback, and operational learnings into clear, detailed tickets that our agentic build pipeline can act on.
• Precision matters here. A vague spec produces vague software. You'll learn to write specs that leave nothing ambiguous.
• Work closely with the Head of Product, Product Owners, and Engineering to refine requirements before work begins.

• The front lines of ops are where product problems show up first. You'll synthesize what you see – support patterns, delivery friction, partner feedback – and surface insight that shapes prioritization and product decisions.
• Move the team from status updates toward insight generation: connecting signals across our platform and partners into something actionable.
• Over time, help establish shared visibility across roadmap progress, delivery health, and cross‑functional dependencies.

• When you hit a recurring problem, your instinct should be to solve it once, not patch it repeatedly.
• Reach for LLM and agentic tools to automate manual workflows. This team uses AI to build software; you should use it to run operations.
• Your long‑term goal is to automate yourself out of the manual parts of this job – and into higher‑leverage…