[Hiring] Chief Operating Officer @Storyteller

Role Description

This is a build-it role, not an inherit-a-machine role. We have a hard-won, exciting position across multiple products and a long list of world-class clients.

You will own how the company actually operates, end to end, across all of our products. The brief is to take outcomes, principles and direction – and make the right things happen, with the right people, processes and accountability in place, without needing to be told what to do next.

If you need a finished machine handed to you, this is not your role. If you want to build one, it might be the best role you ever take.

What You Will Own

• The operating model: Turn how we work into something real: clear roles, responsibilities, teams and processes, so every person knows what their job is and what good looks like. Make it live, make people use it, and hold them to it.
• People and structure: Hiring at pace and at a high bar, line management at scale, building teams that can take a brief and drive it to a stable next state. Placing strong people where they excel.
• Cost and infrastructure: Own what we spend across SaaS, AI and cloud. No more surprise bills for things we do not need, are not using, or never noticed. We treat every line item as negotiable.
• Delivery rigour: Make sure that for our biggest client moments – finals, tentpoles, major events – we show up obsessed with the client getting the most from our tech, with the coverage, monitoring and ownership to match. Never the minimum.
• AI-first operations: Drive our internal operating layer as the system that actually runs the company. Get every repeatable process under harness using AI, skills and automation, and make that the default way we work rather than the tenth priority.
• Operating leadership: Be the person the founders can hand outcomes and direction to and trust to execute. Spot where a role or a process is missing, define it, and put it in place – rather than waiting for it to be specified.

AI-First

We are not adding AI to how we work; we are rebuilding how the company operates around it. Our own operating layer is becoming the system that runs the business, and the expectation is that repeatable processes are put under harness with AI, skills and automation rather than solved with additional headcount.

We are looking for a COO who already operates this way: someone who uses AI daily to create real leverage in their own work, who instinctively asks how a problem could be solved AI-first before defaulting to a new hire, and who can raise an entire team to that standard.

Who We Are Looking For

• You have run operations in a fast-moving, high-growth technology or SaaS environment, where scope was undefined and you liked it that way.
• You are hands-on as well as strategic – happy to read a billing dashboard, sit with engineers, take a client call and reset a team's structure in the same week.
• You are direct, you hold people to account, and you are as good at building people up as you are at making hard calls.
• You are already using AI to get leverage, not talking about it.
• You are a doer who moves things and owns ambiguity – you would rather ship something rough and improve it than write a plan about shipping it later.
• You will thrive on speed and a degree of chaos, and you will not be the right person if you need heavy process and a settled environment to function.
• You might have built or run something of your own, or operated at COO / Head of Operations / senior operating level somewhere that was scaling hard. What matters most is evidence that you make things actually happen.

Recruitment Process

• An initial call with a senior member of the Operations team.
• A compensated task – we care about how you think and what you would actually do, not a polished pitch.
• A final call with the CEO.
• And that’s it!

Benefits

• Up to ZAR 1,600,000 salary on a full time, permanent employment contract
• Fully remote working anywhere in South Africa!
• 33 Days Paid Leave and Benefits
• Exciting high growth product, relied on by leading global brands, particularly within sports
• Working with the latest hardware, tech stack, AI tools, and product workflows.

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