Do you take pride in getting the details right: contracts out on time, invoices correct, and helping teammates get fully set up before starting a new project? And do you use AI to simplify work? Join Appleseed and keep a small team of behavioral consultants free to focus on clients fighting extreme poverty and climate change.
This is an execution-heavy Operations Manager role focused on owning and improving existing systems; it does not include people management.
🌍 This is a remote position. You may be based anywhere.
Role Structure
Job type: Core team. Full-time: 24 focused hours/week over a 4-day week (Thursdays off). Our whole team works this way, which makes us disciplined about what gets our time.
Location: Fully remote, ideally in a Europe or Africa time zone
Reports to: Philip Kao, Executive Director. Much of your work would be asynchronous, with a regular team calls on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly cadence. Plus an annual in-person team retreat.
Start: As soon as possible. We're reviewing applications as they arrive and aim to hire in December, with onboarding continuing into January 2027.
Compensation & Benefits: $72,000-80,000 (USD) per year, depending on experience. Flexible location and schedule, 178 annual workdays (vs. a global average of 225–244); a calm, focused work week, with few meetings and no office politics; stipends for office upgrades and equipment, professional development, and childcare while traveling.
About Appleseed
🌍 Appleseed is a small behavioral agency for global development (core team of 6 plus a roster of freelancers). We are obsessed with one big problem across the sector: important solutions failing to stick.
We serve up to a dozen client teams per year who are fighting to end poverty or protect the planet. When they struggle to engage people or drive uptake of a service, product, or idea, they and/or their funders put us on the case. Appleseed consultants dive deep—taking an ethnographic approach to investigate challenges and uncover human insights. Then we help our clients design accordingly and bring about changes required for impact.
We envision a world where all impact organizations design based on people’s needs and realities. We partner only with nonprofits and funders who seek to preserve human dignity as they foster change. See how we have enabled:
smallholder farmers in Senegal to space crops for higher yields 👩🏾🌾
schoolchildren in Kenya to stop drinking contaminated water 🚱
farmers in Guatemala to plant a fortified maize to combat malnutrition 🌽
Here you’ll find:
A small, candid, curious team with high standards and low ego
A flexible, learning-rich culture that prizes rigor and honesty
Want to learn more? Meet us at appleseedimpact.org/team
Purpose of the Role
To ensure Appleseed's operations run smoothly and get better every year.
Admin takes minimal time, errors stay rare, turnarounds are fast, and we have clear numbers to inform decisions... even as we grow. This frees the team to focus on clients, and gives everyone who works with Appleseed a smooth experience.
What you'd do, in order of importance
You'd own our operational systems: run them day to day, understand how they connect and depend on each other, and keep making them simpler.
You'd own our operational systems: run them day to day, understand how they connect and depend on each other, and keep making them simpler, with documentation clear enough that anyone could step in.
Manage finance operations: contracts, invoicing, payment follow-up, payroll, expenses, bookkeeping, tracking project budgets and billed time, cashflow tracking and projections, monthly budget check-ins, and the annual audit.
Run recruiting, business development and other internal processes: posting roles, running our AI-assisted candidate screening, tracking candidates and writing to them; setting up tools and channels for new projects; facilitating team processes like our OKR setting, employee engagement survey, and bi-monthly reviews of our sales pipeline.
Spot problems and opportunities early, and flag or solve them. Knowing our strategic priorities, you'll see where our operations help us or get in the way. For example:
Cash getting tight several months out, or a client who keeps paying late.
Room in the team's schedule for another project, or a task eating hours every week that AI could take over.
Use AI to keep things simple as we grow. Running smoothly without adding support staff requires using AI to keep up as the work gets more complex. For example:
A client signs a contract, and the project's Slack channel, Drive folder and Asana tasks set themselves up.
AI tracks our sales pipeline and predicts which deals will close, when and for how much, so cashflow and staffing projections stay current.
You'll also be a steady, warm voice that clients, funders, freelancers and candidates hear from about contracts, invoices, scheduling, and more.
Our main tools: Slack, Asana, Notion, Xero, Gusto, Clockify, PandaDoc, Breezy, Canva, Claude, ChatGPT, Zapier, and Google Workspace.
What Success in This Role Looks Like
Team members feel organized, supported, and confident in the systems they rely on.
Contracts and invoices go out without errors or delays
Budgets and cashflow are current, accurate and easy to read
Clients, freelancers and candidates get clear, warm, timely replies
Fewer things fall through the cracks, and issues surface early
Leadership can see pipelines, workloads and financial health without micromanaging
Our systems get easier to use each year, even as the team grows
you’ll love this role if... ✅
You've run operations and finances for 5+ years
You enjoy working behind the scenes, keeping things running and making them simpler
You're detail-oriented, reliable, and calm when things get complicated
You write clear, warm, direct emails to people across any culture and time zone
You already use AI to make your work easier, and you've built automations or AI workflows that others use (Zapier, Make, scripts, Claude or similar)
You feel real satisfaction when a month closes cleanly
You're more excited by meaningful long-term contribution than rapid advancement
You thrive in a small, tight-knit, remote team often working asynchronously
You consider feedback a gift, even when it is hard to give or receive
You love learning, and would be excited to join Appleseed's book club
this role will not be a fit if… 🚩
You need to be where the action is to feel good about your work
You want to design systems from scratch or lead a large-scale transformation
You hesitate when it's time to send an email or pick up the phone
You can't stand spreadsheets, or find data entry an unbearable chore
Repetitive monthly work (invoices, payroll, reconciliations) drains you
You use AI only now and then, and haven't built any automations or AI workflows
You need close supervision or highly detailed instructions
You need in-person teamwork and meetings to stay motivated
You avoid feedback or find candid conversations uncomfortable
This section of the JD rubs you the wrong way
Our Process
We run a transparent process designed to explore a two-way fit:
Application: to understand your experience and working style
Interview: to get acquainted and discuss mutual interests
Simulations: hands-on exercises that reflect the work + feedback
References & conversations: to answer questions, ensure a great fit, and come to terms
We know this process takes time, and we appreciate your investment. Appleseed is building an inner circle of trusted team members—needed for challenging work with smart clients that impacts real lives. We hope that this one-time exploration of fit will translate into years of fruitful collaboration! Thank you in advance.