Founding Operations Lead
Own the day-to-day reality of the marketplace. Helper supply, customer experience, response-time commitments, the lot. You'll be employee #8 and the person every customer-impacting metric ladders to.
About the role
Helpward is a year-old marketplace launching in 10 metros. The matching engine is live, the helper pipeline is real, but the operational craft that turns 'a working product' into 'a marketplace customers reflexively trust' is the gap. You'll close it — owning supply planning per city, response-time SLAs, dispute throughput, and the playbooks the wider team will follow as we scale.
What you'll do
- Own the helper-supply pipeline per city — applications, vetting velocity, approval rates.
- Hit the 4-hour-safety / 24-hour-disputes response-time commitments — and beat them.
- Run the dispute & insurance-claim queue end-to-end; coordinate with the underwriting carrier on claims.
- Build the playbooks (and eventually hire the teams) for ops at Helpward's next 10 cities.
- Publish the quarterly transparency report — own the figures, write the narrative.
- Sit one row from the founder; expect rapid context-switching and very few internal meetings.
What we're looking for
- 5+ years operations experience at an on-demand marketplace, gig platform, or high-touch logistics company.
- Track record of owning a P&L-adjacent metric (response time, completion rate, NPS) and moving it materially.
- Comfort being on-call for genuinely urgent safety issues — this is the job some weeks.
- Vancouver-based or willing to relocate; first year is in-person at our Mt. Pleasant office.
Nice to have
- Previous founding-stage experience.
- Familiarity with Stripe Connect, Checkr/Triton, and the operational mechanics of two-sided marketplaces.
- Direct experience working through serious safety incidents and the post-incident review.
How to apply
Email careers@helpward.com with a short note and your CV or LinkedIn. Reference the role title in the subject line. We respond to every applicant within 7 business days. The process is 3–4 conversations and a paid trial project.
- Trust & SafetySenior Trust & Safety ManagerLead the team that screens every helper, adjudicates every escalated case, and shapes the policies that make Helpward worth booking. T&S is the moat; you're its operator.
- EngineeringFull-stack Engineer (Next.js + Supabase)Ship features end-to-end across our Next.js 16 + Supabase + Stripe stack. You'll own a feature area, work directly with the founder, and have outsized leverage over the product the entire team uses.
- DesignFounding DesignerOwn the design system, the marketing site, and the product surface. You'll set the visual + interaction bar for everything Helpward ships, customer-facing and helper-facing.
- CommunityHelper Community ManagerRun the helper side of the marketplace — recruitment, onboarding support, retention, and the in-person community gatherings that turn a gig into a craft.