Director, Operations Excellence

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.

***We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.***

The Director, Operations Excellence will serve as the operational conscience of AHEAD’s end-to-end operational processes — bringing cross-functional visibility, structured accountability, and continuous improvement discipline to the systems and workflows that power our client experience. This leader will own a holistic view across AHEAD’s operations, from issue identification and root cause analysis to corrective action tracking and executive reporting, ensuring that our client-facing platforms — including Hatch, Astra, and future AI-enabled tools — are backed by clean, consistent, and reliable operational data.

This is a foundational role with direct executive sponsorship from the COO. The Director will build and lead the Operations Excellence function from the ground up, working cross-functionally to establish the accountability infrastructure that AHEAD needs to scale. The right candidate will thrive at the intersection of process rigor, cross-functional influence, and executive communication — and will bring a track record of driving measurable operational improvement in complex, growing environments.

### Duties & Responsibilities

**Quality Oversight & Issue Management**

• Own the centralized view of operational quality issues across the quote-to-cash process, ensuring issues are tracked, routed to the right owners, and driven to resolution with clear accountability and timelines.
• Lead rapid triage and cross-functional coordination on the most critical and time-sensitive issues, serving as the primary escalation point for operational quality failures that span multiple teams.
• Identify systemic patterns across the issue queue, distinguishing one-time exceptions from structural process gaps, and facilitating root cause analysis with relevant data-producing teams.
• Track corrective actions from identification through closure, maintaining accountability across teams and escalating to senior leadership when resolution is at risk.

**Process Standards & Continuous Improvement**

• Partner with cross-functional teams to define, document, and maintain standard operating procedures for key workflows in the quote-to-cash process, ensuring process context is captured, accessible, and continuously improved.
• Identify automation and process improvement opportunities that reduce manual effort, strengthen upstream data quality, and reduce recurring issue volume over time.
• Build and maintain a centralized knowledge base that captures institutional process knowledge and serves as a shared reference for the broader organization.
• Champion adoption of new ways of working across the organization, inspiring commitment and driving alignment behind quality and continuous improvement objectives.

**Reporting & Executive Communication**

• Maintain a regular cadence of reporting to senior leadership on open issues, trends, SLA performance, and corrective action progress — synthesizing complex operational data into clear, executive-ready insights.
• Develop and own the operational quality scorecard, establishing baselines and tracking measurable improvement over time.
• Serve as a trusted advisor and cross-functional partner to Operations, Client Applications, Enterprise Technology, and Foundry leadership on issues that affect data quality and client outcomes.
• Provide governance and oversight for operational quality initiatives, ensuring milestones and deliverables generate measurable business impact.

**Function Building**

• Establish the Operations Excellence function, including its operating model, governance cadence, escalation paths, and engagement model with cross-functional partners.
• Help build organizational quality capabilities by embedding best practices and fostering a culture of operational excellence across the teams that produce and consume our operational data.

### First 90 Days

The near-term priority for this role is establishing the foundation of the Operations Excellence function and demonstrating early impact. Expected deliverables within the first 90 days include: