Director, Strategic Business Operations

Responsibilities

• Uncover, prioritize, and drive the business’s highest-impact initiatives across product, growth, pricing, and creator economics.
• Perform deep-dive analyses on core metrics (e.g., creator churn, reader LTV, network monetization, conversion funnels) to guide product and monetization decisions.
• Conduct rigorous competitive analysis, market mapping, and strategic positioning to evaluate new opportunities, industry shifts, and expansion vectors.
• Partner directly with the CEO and CFO to translate complex operational data into clear, actionable executive decisions and board-level strategy.
• Design and run our business cadence—KPI tracking, operational reviews, cross-functional alignment, and objective-setting—keeping the executive team in sync and operating with discipline.
• Lead and mentor a lean team of operators as Substack scales, while remaining willing and eager to do the frontline analytical work yourself.

Requirements

• 5–10 years of total work experience, including foundational years at a top-tier management consulting firm (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) or investment bank (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs), followed by high-impact BizOps/Strategy experience at a fast-growing tech company.
• Top-tier undergraduate or MBA (HBS, Stanford, Wharton, etc.) preferred.
• Highly comfortable with quantitative modeling and data manipulation (advanced SQL, Excel/financial modeling, Python/R a plus). You don’t ask a team to pull numbers for you—you dig into the database yourself.
• First-principles problem solver: break down complex, messy problems into clear hypotheses and actionable frameworks before writing code or pulling data.
• Bias for action & execution: own implementation end-to-end, rolling up your sleeves to change operational realities.
• Low ego, high ownership: act like an owner and care deeply about solving the right problems for creators and readers.
• Executive-level communication: concise, direct, and persuasive—able to influence senior executives, engineers, and creative partners alike without relying on corporate jargon.

Compensation

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $200,000 - $300,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.