Strategy & Operations

Job description

Collections runs like an emergency room. You show up in crisis, get triaged by a stranger who doesn't know your history and leave with no follow-up. We're turning it into primary care for consumer finance. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere. 70 million Americans fall behind on a debt every year. Most want to pay what they owe and can't find a way back. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. They rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more with us because we collect more and charge less. Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to do the opposite. In someone's hardest financial moment we make the experience more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow. ABOUT THE ROLE As a member of the Strategy and Operations team at January, you'll drive the decisions and work that directly accelerate our enterprise growth. You'll join one of the three teams: the team that turns complex client integrations into a build-once, scale-forever capability, the team that deepens client relationships and converts them into durable revenue, or the team that makes January's compliance record the competitive edge clients cite when they choose us — and the reason they continue to expand. This role is for someone with the diagnostic instinct to see where leverage exists, the operational range to act on it, and the ambition to define how January works at scale. You'll join at a moment where our growth in regulated financial services is creating more opportunity than the company can capture operationally. The playbook for how we partner with our largest clients, prove our value in the market, and scale our capabilities hasn't been written yet. You're writing it. YOUR IMPACT Drive the decisions and work that compound January's growth. Own a point of view on the biggest growth levers within your domain — whether that's untapped client potential, compliance advantages competitors can't match, or implementation rigor that wins prospects. Identify the patterns in your team's work that should reshape product priorities, operational investments, or go-to-market strategy — and drive the decision before leadership has to ask. Drive the highest-leverage initiatives end-to-end, from diagnosis through adoption. Kill low-value work with conviction. Build the systems, playbooks, and capabilities that compound. Eliminate the drag that prevents your team from focusing on the highest-value work — through automation, tooling, workflow redesign, or killing the process entirely. Turn repeat client situations into systematic capabilities so the next complex escalation, integration, or audit response gets handled faster and better because of the pattern you built, not because the right person happened to be in the room. Build the analytical infrastructure that lets your team self-diagnose. Create frameworks that turn ICs into owners and drivers so that judgment and execution don't bottleneck. Own the named outcomes of the team you join. You'll join one of the three teams with the greatest opportunity to unlock growth — and be immediately accountable for its concrete outcomes. - Client Strategy — Own a portfolio of client relationships and identify expansion opportunities across current segments and entirely new categories. Become the person clients call when they want to try something new. Translate what clients need next into strategic insight that shapes January's product roadmap and go-to-market priorities. - Client Implementations — Own client integrations end-to-end, from contract review through first accounts placed, delivering launches that go live cleanly and on time. Turn every implementation into infrastructure: the patterns, templates, tooling, and runbooks that make each successive integration faster and less dependent on any single person. Align Product and Engineering on the tooling investments that compound implementation speed across all clients. - Compliance — Own January's compliance advantage in an industry where regulatory scrutiny is constant and competitors' failures are costly — build the systems, processes, and evidence base that make our compliance posture demonstrably stronger than competitors and give Sales a concrete edge in every deal. Turn every regulatory interaction, audit, and client compliance question into source material for that competitive moat. Align Legal, Product, and Operations around making compliance a revenue lever. These are the teams with the greatest need today, but January's growth is opening new opportunities across the business. Depending on your background and what we learn through the process, there may be other teams where your impact would be even greater. QUALIFICATIONS - Track record of owning operational outcomes end-to-end across strategy, operations, or consulting roles — direct ownership of diagnosing problems and shipping solutions, not advisory or support. - Experience owning client relationships or client-facing delivery in a high-touch context — managing strategic accounts, leading complex technical projects, or running engagements where you were the named point of contact through both wins and setbacks. - Demonstrated ability to structure messy, incomplete data into insights that changed behavior — comfort working across multiple systems, identifying patterns across a portfolio, and quantifying business impact to drive decisions. - Experience driving outcomes that depend on teams you don't control — getting Product, Engineering, Legal, or other functions to act on your diagnosis, align on your priorities, and invest in your recommendations. - Technical fluency to build automations and operational tools without requiring engineering support — whether that's LLM-assisted workflows, automated reporting, or intelligent routing. You build solutions that teams adopt and maintain independently. - Strong preference for candidates who've operated at the intersection of strategy and execution — whether that's a management consulting background with a transition into operating roles, or experience building operationally at a high-growth startup where you owned outcomes end-to-end. Analytical depth and comfort building in environments where infrastructure was being created rather than inherited. - Familiarity with financial services, fintech, or regulatory and compliance-heavy industries is a plus. HOW WE WORK - Decentralization beats control. The best calls get made by the people closest to them, not routed up a chain. You'll set the standards that let the team decide without you in the room. - Speed beats perfection. You run tight loops, act at 70% on reversible calls and adjust as you learn. Fast loops beat slow ones. - Candor beats comfort. You'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes everyone's time. - Writing beats the average meeting. Clarity scales. - AI runs through everything here. We built our own code reviewer that beats the alternatives. Our voice AI handles most inbound calls with zero hallucinated payments. Engineers ship 3-4x the PRs they used to. You'll push it further into the work than almost any company you've worked at. - We operate at every altitude. No one here lives only on Mount Olympus, not even the leaders. We get into the trenches to learn the ground truth, then refine our information flows so ground truth climbs as fast as direction comes down. - We build in person, at least three days a week in our office in Nolita, with a growing group coming in every day. Random run-ins cross-pollinate ideas. Face time builds trust no thread can. Building alongside people makes work far more fun. We are currently hiring for this position in our New York office. As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.