[Closed] We’re Hiring: Operations in Service of Public Interest Tech

We are looking for two people to join our operations team! These positions will support critical organization-wide processes, facilitating the hiring, contracting, and payment to a diverse and engaged community. If you’re an early to mid-career operations person interested in building support systems for all the great people in our community, read on!

🗃️ Operations Coordinator, People — This position will be responsible for administration and coordination of people in the CS&S community including employees, vendors, governing body committee members, volunteers, members of our Board of Directors, and other community members.

🧾 Operations Coordinator, Accounts Payable & Accounts Receivable — This position will be responsible for administration and coordination of two critical needs at CS&S: accounts payable and accounts receivable.

About our work

The operations team supports our programs and 12 organizations who are exploring new research in open source technology. To support this work, we focus on optimizing processes and testing workflows to make business run more smoothly for everyone.

Through our programs and fiscal sponsorship, we provide the organizational, legal, and infrastructural support to mission-aligned projects. It is critical for us to have an operational system that can fulfill fundamental nonprofit needs, and do so efficiently and with transparency to our projects. We also pride ourselves on developing the skills of our project leaders in nonprofit management through education, clear communication, and being a good steward of their projects.

Why join us?

We’re growing rapidly, with an 82% increase in funding and three new projects added in the last year. We need your input to help us build effective processes that enable our teams to grow while staying focused on work that addresses critical societal challenges.

To promote the expansion of community-driven public interest technology, we leverage our unique identities, cultures, and personal experiences to inform our approach to decision-making and problem-solving. Your contributions will help evolve our systems and processes as we grow, with the opportunity to be creative, operate independently, and deepen your skill set.

It’s an exciting time to join CS&S and contribute to operational initiatives that will advance the power of data to improve the social and economic lives of all people.

What are we looking for?

For these roles, we’d like people who have at least a year of experience in the functional areas they’ll be working in. Depending on the position, you should know your way around basic contract terms and offer letters, or what an IBAN is and how to determine what countries US businesses can send payments to. You should have experience following operating procedures and identifying areas where they can be improved. While we do not require previous nonprofit experience, we would like to see some experience or demonstration of your interest in our mission.

Beyond your experience, we are seeking self-directed people who will be excited to help develop and document how CS&S operates. You should bring your best ideas for employee on-boarding and tell us what vendor management processes need to be discarded. Our operations team, currently two people, facilitates over 7 million dollars in revenue and payments annually and we need you to help us make it better.

What can you expect if you join CS&S?

Workload

• Sustainability is discussed a lot in nonprofits. A core piece of sustainability is ensuring that workload is sustainable for staff. Because we anticipate periods of higher workload (hello November & December!), we aim for a baseline of 75%-80% workload. We also want to ensure everyone has someone who can cover their tasks while they are out of office. As a quickly growing organization, these are both opportunities that we continue to work towards.
• In addition to thinking holistically about our capacity, we encourage staff to create boundaries around work and life. We schedule weekly Zoom-free days, and we help each other take time off to rest, reset and recharge.

Professional development

• Grow your professional network by joining our diverse community of over 145 collaborators and partners.
• Nurture your skills or take on new challenges with reimbursement for professional conferences and training workshops.

What is the application and interview process?

Our application process involves three parts, the application, a screening interview, and a longer final interview. You can apply using this form. We ask applicants to include the information they feel best represents them in their resume and cover letter. Our screening interview is a 20 minute interview to understand an applicant's qualifications. The final interview gives us an opportunity to evaluate fit and an applicant’s approach to problem solving and growth. We will begin evaluating applications on May 23rd and hope to send offers in late June or July, depending on quantity of applications.

We’ve included details of our interview process below.

Application and Interview Process

Application
In our application, we ask you to include information about your work experience and job history in your attachment to the job application. We also would like to know why you are applying to CS&S. Both of these questions on our application provide an opportunity for applicants to showcase what is important to them while aiming to not have a time-consuming application.

Screening Interview

After we begin reviewing applications, we will reach out to candidates that have sufficient experience and fit with the position for a 20 minute screening call.

Email invite to interviewee

Thank you for applying for the Operations Coordinator role at Code for Science & Society (CS&S). The hiring committee would like to book a 20 minute first round interview.

What to expect: This will be a 20 minute video call. For the first 15 minutes, you will speak with two members of the hiring committee who will ask a set of scripted questions. All candidates are asked the same set of questions. There will be five minutes set aside for you to ask questions of the hiring committee. The goals of this interview are to give us a sense of your experience, career goals, and general alignment with needs of the position as well as to allow candidates to meet stakeholders and ask questions. If you prefer, you can provide written answers to the screening questions and we will schedule a 10 minute call to meet part of our team, discuss the screening question responses, and answer any further questions.

Screening Interview Script

Hello! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. This is a screening interview. The goal here is for us to get to know a little more about you and give you an opportunity to ask some questions. The format of the interview is standardized, we ask everyone the same questions. We will spend about 15 minutes on our questions and then have 5 minutes for you to ask us any questions. You can always follow up by email if you have more questions.

To be transparent about our process, we are scheduling screening interviews through [Date TBD]. Once all screening interviews are completed, we will reach out to candidates about the next round.

Any questions on the format of this interview or our timeline and process?

• You said in your application you applied because [Why answer in application]. Can you tell us a little more about what attracted you to apply for this job?
• Can you tell us a little bit about your approach to business operations, including finance or HR? Or describe in more detail a business process you’ve been involved in running?
• What is your experience working with research-centered open data science communities or other nonprofit communities?
• Where would you like your career to go? What kind of skills are you most interested in building?
• What’s your experience with internationally distributed communities or organizations?

Second Round Interview
Candidates that demonstrate in the first round their alignment with CS&S mission and values will be advanced to the second round. In the second round, we’d like to understand your approach to operations, the impact you’d like to make, and how you approach both interpersonal and operational problems.

Email invite to interviewee
In advance of your interview this week the committee would like to pass along more details on what to expect. This will be a 45 minute video call. This call will be attended by members of the hiring committee, which is made up of individuals from across programs, operations, and finance at CS&S.

The first 15 minutes will focus on questions that will be asked of each candidate related to how you would approach developing learning about our current operations processes and how you would approach making process changes. In advance of the interview, you may wish to dig into our public facing documentation at codeforscience.org/docs. However, there is no need to prepare any work for this interview.

The next 20 minutes of the interview will be a mix of questions designed to help us understand how you work with a team and how you approach problems. The final 10 minutes of the interview will be reserved for your questions for us.

Second Round Interview Script

We will update this when the second round interview script is completed. It may be slightly different for each job posting and depending on the areas we felt were unclear after the screening interviews.

Please see the job descriptions for full information at codeforscience.org/jobs. Feel free to get in touch with questions by emailing hiring at codeforsociety.org.