Business Operations Lead

Prelim is growing 2-3x annually and our platform powers account opening and onboarding for banks across the country. Our team is at a turning point: the informal systems that got us here won’t scale with where we’re headed next.

Right now, the work of coordinating across teams, tracking projects, and keeping the company’s operational rhythm running falls on engineers, designers, and product leads. That’s not sustainable, and we know it.

As our first Business Operations hire, you’ll build the operational infrastructure from scratch. There’s no playbook, no existing business ops team, and no predecessor in the role. You’ll decide what to systematize first, build processes that scale, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks while the company continues to grow rapidly.

If you want to shape how a fintech startup scales, this is your chance to make a huge impact.

• Cross-team coordination. You’ll maintain the picture of who's working on what across product, design, engineering, and implementations. When a new bank comes in, you're the person who looks at current allocation, identifies who has capacity, and presents staffing options, not the founder doing it from memory in a Slack DM.
• Workload visibility and risk tracking. You’ll build and run a lightweight system so leadership has a weekly view of team load, active work, and delivery risk. You surface early warning signs like stalled projects, overloaded teams, or unanswered customer concerns. The goal is to surface problems before they become emergencies.
• Operational rhythm. Leads syncs have agendas. Cycle kickoffs happen on schedule. Action items from meetings get tracked and followed up on. OOO plans are documented. 90‑day reviews get scheduled. You own the cadence that keeps the company running smoothly.
• Staffing and project coordination. When projects need to be reassigned, when someone goes on PTO, when a customer escalation needs routing, you're the person who makes sure the handoff happens and nothing gets dropped. You maintain the map of who covers what, and you update it in real time.
• Vendor and logistics management. Office space coordination, software contracts, expense approvals, travel booking for off‑sites and team meetups in collaboration with People Operations. This work is real, it takes real hours, and it currently lands on people who should be building product.

You’re not a people manager, team leads manage their own reports. You're not making product decisions, the founder and product leads own the roadmap. You're not doing the work itself, you're making sure the people who do have what they need and that nothing falls through cracks.

• 3‑6 years of experience at a startup that scaled through the 15‑to‑80 person range. You've lived through the transition from "everyone does everything" to "we need real structure," and you know what works and what's overkill at each stage.
• You've held a role where you were responsible for cross‑functional coordination. Titles you might have held include ops manager, business operations, chief of staff, program manager, or a senior role at a consulting firm. The title matters less than whether you were the person who kept the trains running.
• You're a strong writer and communicator. You'll create the operational documentation that doesn't exist yet, staffing plans, project trackers, meeting agendas, status reports, process docs. If you can't write clearly and concisely, everything you produce will be ignored.
• You're relentlessly organized without being bureaucratic. You add just enough structure that things don't fall through cracks, but you know the difference between useful process and process for its own sake.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. In the first month, you might be updating a project board, chasing down a dropped support ticket, organizing travel for an off‑site, and building a staffing spreadsheet, all in the same day. If that mix of variety and ownership sounds exciting, you'll feel right at home here.
• You're direct and un‑intimidated. You'll need to tell a team lead "your team is overloaded and we need to cut something" and tell the…