Lead Operations Analyst, AI & Automation

Location: Dallas preferred, close to where our inventory and operations run

Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside

Department: Operations

Reports to: Director of Operations

Also posted as:
Senior Operations Analyst
· Business Intelligence Analyst
· Automation Lead
· Data Analyst

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one.

We're a 10‑person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG‑obsessed rock stars to join our team.

Running an operation -- the models, the dashboards, the inventory math, the recurring processes -- used to take an army of analysts. With AI, it takes one exceptional thinker to wield it.

We're hiring a Lead Operations Analyst to own the analytical and automation backbone of our operation. You'll run the daily and weekly inventory processes, own the dashboards our decisions depend on, and build the workflows and automations that take manual work off the whole team's plate. Your home base is operations and inventory, but the leverage you create will benefit the whole company, growth included.

You own the dashboards, the recurring workflows, and the automation buildout. Operations leadership owns the final inventory policy and the business tradeoffs.

Here's the specific kind of person we're looking for: someone who has the expertise to do the work by hand, but has figured out how to get massive leverage by building custom skills, workflows, and plugins that leverage AI tools and other modern tools to do the heavy lifting, and has the judgment to check it, catch what's wrong, and ship something they'd stake their name on.

You know the fundamentals cold, which is exactly why you can trust yourself to move fast with AI and still get the numbers right. In a business where inventory accuracy is everything, that combination is the whole job.

First 30 days:
You take over running our daily and weekly inventory processes, so they no longer depend on the founder or ops leadership to keep moving. You also identify and ship at least one workflow or automation that unlocks real, measurable value.

First few months:
You own the operations dashboards end to end, so the team makes decisions off reliable, self‑serve data you maintain, and you've built a growing library of automations that remove manual hours across the operation.

By the end of year one, the analytical and automation engine of operations runs on you, not on the founder. Ops decisions are backed by data nobody has to scramble to assemble. You've shipped a real portfolio of time‑saving automations across ops and growth, and you've become the person who figures out how we put each new wave of AI tooling to work.

• Run the recurring engine: own the daily and weekly inventory processes end to end, reliably, without dropping balls.

• Own the dashboards: build and maintain the operational dashboards and data the team trusts to make decisions. Get the numbers right every time.

• Build leverage: identify high‑value bottlenecks and ship no‑code or low‑code workflows and automations that eliminate manual work across operations and growth.

• Orchestrate AI and verify it: use AI to do operational work at a fraction of the old cost, and bring the craft and rigor to check its output and catch what's wrong.

• Operationalize what's next: stay on the frontier of AI tooling and own how we put each new capability to work in our operation.

• Create leverage across the company: based primarily in operations, you'll also build tools and automations that help our growth team move faster.

You start by running the morning inventory process, except 'running' now means kicking off a workflow you built, scanning the output for…