Business Operations Associate

Harper•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

The company is addressing a significant problem in the commercial insurance market where 36 million businesses are underinsured or uninsured due to a slow, opaque, and confusing distribution system. They are building an AI-led platform, aiming for over 90% AI-driven operations, to make humans more effective, improve customer experience, and eliminate friction. The company is experiencing rapid growth, adding approximately 1,000 customers per month and growing 100x year-over-year. This role is crucial for the operational backbone of the AI systems, requiring someone to manage and improve the business operations to support this growth. The core thesis is that by learning the entire operation and turning tribal knowledge into scalable systems, this role can significantly impact the company's trajectory. The ideal candidate will be responsible for identifying patterns that inform engineering specifications and ultimately grow into leadership positions within the company.

Requirements

1–3 years of experience in a high-pace environment (startup, consulting, banking, operations, or equivalent)
Strong communication skills—written and verbal—with customers, underwriters, and internal teams
Comfort with data: you don't need to be a data scientist, but you should be able to pull insights from a spreadsheet and make a decision
Bias toward action over analysis
Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate immediately

Nice To Haves

Previous startup or founder experience
Insurance, fintech, or regulated industry exposure
Familiarity with CRM tools, workflow automation, or AI-assisted tooling
Background in sales, customer success, or account management

Responsibilities

Run the operation — Tackle underwriter follow-ups, manage carrier communications, keep deals moving through the pipeline
Build systems that scale — Create processes, workflows, and organizational structures that make the entire team more effective; make manual work obsolete
Own customer and underwriter relationships — Be the person who ensures nothing falls through the cracks on either side
Enable sales — Arm the sales team with what they need to close: data, materials, process improvements, feedback loops
Touch every stage of the insurance lifecycle — Intake, onboarding, servicing, renewals; you'll see how the entire business works, not just one slice
Shape what engineering builds — Work directly with engineering teams to translate operational pain points into product requirements
Jump between roles — Move fluidly across functions based on what's most urgent; comfort with ambiguity isn't optional, it's the job