Job Description
Director of Operations, Education
at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (View all jobs)
Redwood City, CA
Founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education and Justice and Opportunity, we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and movement building, to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.
Our Values
We believe we can help build a future for everyone.
We aim to be daring, but humble: We look for bold ideas — regardless of structure and stage — and help them scale by pairing engineers with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.
We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term: We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.
Stay close to the real problems: We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.
Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
As a Director of Operations for our Education Initiative, you will report to the Head of Education and ensure that we have operational excellence and a great team culture across the full Education initiative, where our people can do some of their career’s best work at CZI.
Our team brings together a wide mix of domains and backgrounds including teachers, school and district leaders, educational research scientists and learning engineers, education policy leaders, software engineers, product managers, data scientists, designers and user researchers. We believe our vision to ensure that every student -- not just a lucky few -- gets the kind of education that will let them realize their true potential is only possible with cross-sector, cross-functional collaboration. A focus of this role will be to craft, maintain and continuously improve our key operational processes and tools to build a strong foundation so these complex collaborations can happen fruitfully and efficiently.
This role is based at our Redwood City HQ office (based remotely until 2021 and SIP is lifted)
You will
Be part of the Education Initiative leadership team where you will deeply understand our strategy, our different domain leaders and contribute to defining the culture that enables everyone to contribute their best work
Ensure that our values around diversity, equity and inclusion are continuously reflected in our internal operations
Drive our key program and grantmaking planning, goal-setting and budgeting process to ensure short-term agility with a solid eye towards building for the long-term
Lead select strategic efforts such as reviewing team structures and developing strategic frameworks to respond to changes in the field
Serve as the primary interface to CZI’s central operations teams including recruiting, HR, finance, facilities and legal teams to represent the Education Initiative’s goals and needs
Develop, ensure and continuously improve consistent grantmaking practices, leveraging existing best practices and exploring innovative ways; support with diligence; run regular grant reviews to ensure strategic alignment; manage broader grantee engagement strategy.
Ensure we have the right internal tools, remote work and physical space setup to foster healthy collaboration and strong internal knowledge management
Manage our internal team communications and team moments including large group meetings to improve their value and efficiency
Directly people manage a small Operations team to support the day-to-day operations of the full Education initiative, included dotted-line management of team members directly supporting operations for our Technology team within the Education initiative
You have
10+ years’ professional experience with at least 2-4 years leading business operations for a large or fast-growing organization, and successfully building, developing and managing teams
Experience navigating ambiguity and developing processes that scale with an organization as it grows
Deep understanding of and prior experience bringing values around Diversity, Equity & Inclusion to life in an operational context through inclusive and equitable operations systems, tools and processes
Experience forging partnerships with a diverse set of functions including teachers and product development teams, as well as internal business functions, including Human Resource, Finance, Legal, Grants etc.
A blend of philanthropy/non-profit, education and private sector experience preferred
Analytical thinking and problem solving experience to help prioritize short and long term organizational needs
Excellent written, verbal and interpersonal communication with the ability to build positive relationships easily and with authenticity at all levels of the organization
Ability to manage change, navigate ambiguity, and drive efficiencies in order to achieve the objectives of the Education team