Title: Senior Associate, Strategic Operations
Experience: 2-5 years
Reporting to: CEO / Managing Director / Organisation Lead
Role type: Cross-functional operations, project management, internal systems, event readiness, vendor coordination, and execution support
About The Role
We are looking for a structured, high-agency operator to support the execution system for a new, fast-moving organisation. This person will work across leadership, finance, marketing, program teams, external partners, vendors, and internal systems to ensure that important work is visible, tracked, followed up, and completed on time.
The role is suited to someone with 2-5 years of experience who is strong at project coordination, written communication, follow-through, tools, and operational detail. The person must be able to create order in ambiguity and keep multiple moving parts under control.
Core mandate
The Senior Associate, Strategic Operations will help build and maintain the organisation's operating rhythm. The role exists to ensure that priorities, owners, action items, deadlines, decisions, risks, event preparation, vendor follow-ups, and internal systems are consistently tracked and visible to leadership.
Key Responsibilities
- Execution tracking and project coordination
- Build and maintain a master tracker for organisational priorities, projects, owners, timelines, risks, blockers, and next steps.
- Follow up with internal teams to keep action items moving.
- Prepare simple dashboards showing what is on track, delayed, blocked, or awaiting a decision.
- Support planning for cross-functional projects by breaking work into owners, milestones, dependencies, and deadlines.
- Escalate delays, missing inputs, and unresolved decisions to leadership at the right time.
- Meeting and action-item management
- Prepare agendas, pre-reads, notes, and follow-up trackers for key internal meetings.
- Capture decisions, action items, owners, and deadlines from leadership and cross-functional meetings.
- Maintain a live action tracker and ensure stale items are followed up or closed.
- Support weekly execution reviews by preparing the latest project and priority status.
- Help improve meeting discipline by ensuring meetings have clear purpose, preparation, and follow-through.
- Event and external engagement preparation
- Maintain the calendar of important conferences, external meetings, partner meetings, donor/funder meetings, panels, and other engagements.
- Prepare event and meeting briefs with context, objectives, attendee background, talking points, materials required, and follow-up actions.
- Coordinate with marketing, communications, leadership, and program teams to ensure decks, one-pagers, bios, demos, talking points, and other materials are ready.
- Track meetings to be set up around events and ensure the right internal people are prepared.
- Track post-event follow-ups and ensure they are completed within agreed timelines.
- Cross-functional operations coordination
- Work with finance to track budget dependencies, vendor payments, contracts, approvals, and reporting timelines.
- Work with marketing and communications to track campaigns, website updates, collateral, announcements, case studies, and event-related material.
- Work with program and project teams to surface operational blockers, dependencies, and upcoming milestones.
- Ensure leadership has a clear view of work that requires decisions, approvals, or intervention.
- Vendor and partner follow-up
- Maintain a vendor tracker covering scope, internal owner, deliverables, timelines, contract status, payment status, and open issues.
- Coordinate with vendors to ensure deliverables are moving as agreed.
- Help prepare vendor briefs, scope notes, and follow-up emails.
- Flag delays, missing documentation, unclear scope, or quality issues early.
- AI, tools, and automation
- Use AI tools such as GPT, Claude, Perplexity, and similar platforms to prepare first drafts of briefs, summaries, notes, SOPs, trackers, and communication material.
- Use productivity and no-code tools such as Google Workspace, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make, Slack workflows, and similar systems to reduce manual work.
- Identify repetitive workflows that can be simplified or automated.
- Build lightweight templates, trackers, forms, and simple automations for recurring operational needs.
- Maintain a small automation backlog and prioritise use cases based on usefulness, simplicity, and reliability.
- Documentation and knowledge management
- Maintain a clean internal knowledge base for key documents, templates, meeting notes, event briefs, vendor information, decision logs, and SOPs.
- Create templates for recurring workflows such as meeting notes, event prep, project plans, risk tracking, vendor tracking, and weekly reviews.
- Ensure important information is documented and easy to find.
- Reduce dependency on verbal updates and scattered documents.
First 90 days
PeriodExpected outputFirst 30 daysMap active projects, meetings, events, vendors, recurring workflows, and open action items. Build the first version of the master tracker, event calendar, and vendor tracker.
Days 31-60Set up weekly execution tracking, action-item follow-up, meeting notes discipline, event preparation templates, and decision tracking.
Days 61-90Improve the operating system based on team usage. Create standard templates and implement the first practical AI/no-code automations.
Required Experience
- 2-5 years of experience in founder's office, strategic operations, business operations, program operations, project management, consulting, startup operations, or a similarly execution-heavy role.
- Experience coordinating multiple stakeholders, deadlines, meetings, and follow-ups.
- Strong written communication and ability to prepare crisp notes, summaries, briefs, trackers, and follow-up emails.
- Strong comfort with spreadsheets, project-management tools, documentation tools, and AI tools.
- Ability to work independently in a fast-moving and ambiguous environment.
Preferred Background
- Experience in a startup, new initiative, consulting firm, social-impact organisation, or fast-scaling team.
- Experience preparing leadership for external meetings, events, panels, or partner engagements.
- Experience coordinating with finance, marketing, vendors, partners, or program teams.
- Hands-on use of GPT, Claude, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make, or similar tools.
- Experience creating dashboards, trackers, SOPs, templates, or no-code automations.
Skills And Attributes
- High ownership and follow-through.
- Structured thinking and attention to detail.
- Ability to convert messy inputs into clear next steps.
- Strong written and verbal communication.
- Comfort chasing updates and closing loops.
- Good judgment on what needs escalation.
- Strong tool adoption and willingness to experiment with AI and automation.
- Low-ego, execution-focused working style.
What Success Looks Like
- The organisation has one current view of priority projects, owners, deadlines, blockers, and next actions.
- Meetings produce clear decisions and follow-ups.
- External events and important meetings are prepared for in advance.
- Vendor and cross-functional dependencies are tracked instead of managed informally.
- Recurring workflows are documented, templated, and selectively automated.
- The organisation becomes more disciplined, less reactive, and less dependent on ad hoc follow-up.
Additional Requirements
- This position requires successful completion of a reference check and employment verification.
- The successful candidate must not be subject to employment restrictions from a former employer (such as a non-compete) that would prevent the candidate from performing the job responsibilities as described.
- Only candidates who have India work authorization will be considered.
Athena Infonomics is an Equal Opportunities Employer
Athena Infonomics is an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.
AI Proficiency and Responsible Use
Proficiency in the responsible and sophisticated use of AI is a mandatory requirement for all roles, across all levels and functions at Athena Infonomics
