[Hiring] Chief Operating Officer @CareMessage

Role Description

CareMessage reaches more than six million patients across nearly 500 safety-net organizations in 45+ states and territories. We are hiring a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to help shape where CareMessage is headed and to build the operating capacity that turns that strategy into patient impact, so that every dollar and every person is deployed in direct service of health equity.

This is a senior executive role and a full member of the Executive Team, reporting directly to the CEO and serving as a strategic thought partner in shaping the organization's direction. The COO leads a multi-functional team spanning:

• People Operations
• Finance
• Compliance and Risk
• Operations
• IT

The mandate is not to grow the organization by adding headcount; it is to build the operating model, systems, and discipline that turn that strategy into a disciplined reality and multiply mission impact, while keeping the team lean, supported, and growing in alignment with our priorities.

Equally important: we need a leader who will own CareMessage's AI strategy for how we operate, not as a cost play, but as a strategic lever for scale and quality.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of multidisciplinary executive experience in strategic leadership across multiple functions.
• A technology-organization background, whether tech nonprofit or for-profit tech scaling, with a clear understanding of scalability and services models.
• Experience shaping multi-year organizational strategy, not only executing a strategy set by others.
• Proven ability to balance mission impact with disciplined business operations.
• Experience leading organizations through comparable growth stages (at least beyond 100+ employees).
• Recent, hands-on experience deploying AI and automation in an operating context.
• Experience working with executive teams, and ideally with governing boards and board committees.
• Superior written and verbal communication, including the ability to present effectively to a Board.

Requirements

• Serve as a full member of the Executive Team and a strategic thought partner to the CEO in enterprise planning, decision-making, and organizational performance.
• Help shape CareMessage’s multi-year organizational strategy, not only execute it; bring an operating point of view that informs where the organization is headed.
• Act as the connective tissue between the Executive Team and our Key Functional Leaders, translating strategy into execution and surfacing tradeoffs clearly.
• Drive alignment across functional leaders so the organization executes as one team with shared priorities, not siloed functions competing for resources.
• Make and own difficult operational decisions; know when to push and when to yield.
• Own the operating plan; ensure functional priorities are resourced, sequenced, and connected to company OKRs.
• Translate enterprise strategy into a clear operating rhythm with defined priorities, ownership, and cadence.
• Establish disciplined execution practices that reinforce accountability and follow-through across functions.
• Build internal systems and processes that scale as the organization grows, without growing the org proportionally.
• Own compliance and risk; ensure the organization meets applicable laws, regulations, and internal policies.
• Frame enterprise risks, tradeoffs, and sequencing decisions to support effective CEO and Board oversight.
• Support Board reporting and committee engagement (including Audit/Compliance, Talent/Compensation, and Finance).
• Coach functional leaders to build high-performing teams that produce more together than the sum of their parts.
• Hold a high bar on performance; recognize that, in a limited-resource environment, underperformers block mission impact.
• Own succession planning and leadership-bench development for the functions you lead.
• Partner with Finance on budget performance, resource allocation, forecasting, and long-term operating sustainability.
• Drive the company’s AI strategy for internal operations: policies, tooling, workflow adoption, and staffing implications.

Benefits

• Starting Base Salary: $287,500 (50th percentile)
• 6-Month Salary: $328,660 (65th percentile)
• Compensation structured as base salary with equal pay for equal work.

What Success Looks Like

This role is the compass for what a high-functioning CareMessage looks like. The COO's first team is the Executive Team, and the COO owns the organization's outcomes (its mission impact and its OKRs), not the metrics of any single function in isolation. Success is a lean, high-performing organization where operational efficiency directly funds greater patient impact:

• Mission Impact/Patient Outcomes.
• Organizational performance and OKR attainment.
• People and team health and trajectory.
• Compliance and risk maturation over time.
• Cost and efficiency metrics.
• Monetization and pricing governance.