[Hiring] Director of Operational Excellence @WarrCloud

Role Description

The Director of Operational Excellence serves as the bridge between Production, Product, Technology, Quality, Data, and Leadership, translating operational opportunities into measurable improvements. Unlike Production, which owns day-to-day execution, Operational Excellence owns the design, optimization, standardization, and evolution of the operating model. While the role coordinates broadly across the business, the Director sits within Operations and is accountable for leading this work end-to-end for the Operations team, ensuring they can process more claims faster, more accurately, consistently, and efficiently without requiring proportional increases in labor.

Key Responsibilities

• Operational Excellence Strategy
  • Develop and maintain the organization's operational excellence strategy.
  • Establish a structured framework for continuous improvement across the claims-processing operation.
  • Identify opportunities to improve productivity, quality, cost, speed, and scalability.
  • Build a prioritized portfolio of operational improvement initiatives.
  • Establish measurable business cases and expected ROI for major initiatives.
  • Report transformation progress and realized benefits to executive leadership.
• Process Design & Standardization
  • Map and analyze end-to-end warranty claims processes.
  • Identify process variation, bottlenecks, rework, unnecessary touches, and manual activities.
  • Develop standardized processes across customers, OEMs, and teams where appropriate.
  • Establish process ownership, documentation, controls, and performance standards.
  • Design future-state workflows that support scale.
  • Ensure process standards are designed around both customer requirements and operational efficiency.
  • Maintain the organization's process architecture and operating model.
  • Partner with Production to identify opportunities, diagnose root causes, design improvements, test new processes, establish standards, support implementation, and measure results.
  • Transition sustainable improvements into Production ownership for ongoing execution and adherence.
• Continuous Improvement
  • Lead Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and other structured improvement methodologies as appropriate.
  • Identify root causes of recurring operational problems.
  • Lead cross-functional improvement projects.
  • Quantify the operational and financial impact of process improvements.
  • Establish control plans to ensure improvements are sustained.
  • Develop a culture where operational problems are systematically identified and solved rather than repeatedly managed.
• Automation & Technology Optimization
  • Identify processes that are strong candidates for automation.
  • Partner with Product and Technology to define operational requirements and future-state workflows.
  • Evaluate opportunities for RPA, AI, machine learning, APIs, workflow automation, and other technologies.
  • Build business cases for automation investments.
  • Prioritize automation based on volume, labor impact, error reduction, customer value, and scalability.
  • Measure realized benefits after implementation.
  • Identify opportunities to reduce manual touches and human intervention throughout the claims lifecycle.
  • Translate operational pain points into clearly defined product opportunities and future-state workflows.
  • Participate in product roadmap planning, prioritizing product opportunities based on operational value.
  • Validate new workflows and technology before broad deployment, identifying gaps between product capabilities and optimal operational processes.
  • Advocate for product decisions that improve scalability and reduce operational complexity.
• Operational Analytics & Performance Intelligence
  • Develop analytical frameworks that identify productivity and process opportunities.
  • Analyze production data to identify root causes rather than simply reporting outcomes.
  • Establish benchmarks across customers, OEMs, processes, and teams.
  • Identify performance variation and determine whether the cause is people, process, technology, training, or workflow design.
  • Partner with Data and Product teams to develop meaningful operational dashboards.
  • Use process mining and work-intelligence technologies where appropriate to understand how work is actually performed.
• Operating Model & Scalability
  • Design operating models capable of supporting rapid growth.
  • Evaluate the appropriate balance of people, technology, automation, and external resources.
  • Identify opportunities for centralized, specialized, or standardized workflows.
  • Develop scalable approaches to onboarding new customers and OEMs.
  • Evaluate organizational and process dependencies that create bottlenecks.
  • Design processes that allow the organization to grow volume without proportionally increasing headcount.
• Change Management & Transformation
  • Lead cross-functional transformation initiatives from concept through implementation.
  • Develop change-management plans for significant process or technology changes.
  • Partner with Production to pilot and validate improvements.
  • Ensure operational leaders understand the reason for changes and the expected outcomes.
  • Establish adoption metrics and post-implementation reviews.
  • Ensure improvements become part of standard operations rather than temporary projects.

Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of experience in Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Business Transformation, Operations Strategy, Consulting, or related fields.
• Demonstrated experience leading large-scale process improvement initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Lean, Six Sigma, process mapping, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Experience working with technology and product organizations.
• Strong analytical and financial business-case skills.
• Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Experience translating data into operational recommendations.
• Strong project and change-management capabilities.

Preferred Automotive Experience

• Automotive warranty claims
• Dealership fixed operations
• Automotive BPO
• OEM warranty processes
• DMS workflows
• Warranty administration
• Multi-OEM environments
• Automotive SaaS or technology-enabled services

Benefits

• 100% Covered Medical
• Unlimited/Flexible PTO Policy
• Stock Options
• 401k with Employer Contribution
• Remote Work Flexibility
• 10 Paid Holidays Per Year