Director of Operations, Deliberations

Change.org

12d • Remote

About The Position

Change.org is searching for a Director of Operations, Deliberations to lead and scale the operations engine behind our local civic dialogues. You will report to our GM of Civic Dialogues. As the leader of our program manager team, you will own the delivery of dialogues across cities, develop the team that runs them, and keep improving how the whole program works, so we can run high-quality, non-partisan deliberations with more cities, faster.
Change.org is the world’s largest platform for democracy. At a time when dissatisfaction with democracy globally is at an all-time high, we’re investing heavily in using AI to build the most powerful tools in the world to give people greater voice, while bringing people across the political spectrum together to identify shared solutions.
Our core petitions platform, used by more than 100 million people annually, is growing rapidly - and we are rebuilding it from the ground-up using new tools to turn anyone into a powerful civic leader on the issues they care about. Soon we will launch a new platform to identify the >80% of issues that most people agree on, locally and nationally, and to mobilize hundreds of millions of people to advocate for those common-ground solutions.
To realize this vision, we’re expanding the most talented team in the world at the intersection of technology and social impact - all focused every day on building healthier democracies globally.

Requirements

• 8+ years in operations or program leadership, ideally including a Chief of Staff or senior ops role in a government office or civic/political organization.
• Proven people manager, with experience developing senior or expert-level individual contributors.
• Direct experience in or with city governments, working alongside officials and staff.
• A track record of building from scratch, scaling a program or process from an early stage.
• Experience running structured dialogue, whether civic deliberations, deliberative processes, or community engagement programs.
• Cross-partisan experience, working with both conservative- and liberal-leaning stakeholders.
• People and team leadership: Leading, hiring, and developing a distributed team of experienced program managers, often in ambiguous, early-stage conditions.
• Operations and program management: Running multiple complex programs concurrently (staggered 12-week cycles) at a reliable cadence and consistent quality.
• Systems thinking and AI fluency: Turning one-off work into repeatable, documented processes that improve over time, with AI woven throughout.
• Strategic program design: Partnering with leadership to set the direction of the program as it scales, not just executing how it runs today.
• Civic dialogue and deliberation: Understanding what makes structured, cross-partisan dialogue genuinely productive rather than performative, and building programs around those principles.
• Cross-partisan stakeholder management: Building trusted relationships with city officials and partners across the political spectrum, with a genuinely non-partisan, bridge-building orientation.
• Policy development: Developing effective, implementable policy at the city government level.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of civic dialogues, holding a biweekly launch cadence at high quality across all active cities, from recruitment through facilitation to post-dialogue reporting.
• Lead and grow the program manager team, hiring and onboarding PMs as the program scales and developing them into confident, independent operators.
• Redesign and document the 12-week dialogue playbook into a repeatable system with AI-powered workflows (participant matching, synthesis, insight extraction) that scale across cities.
• Build trusted relationships with city offices (mayors, staffers) across the political spectrum, working comfortably with both Republican and Democratic leaders and protecting our non-partisan credibility.
• Act as a strategic partner to the GM and policy directors on the growth and direction of the Deliberations program.

Benefits

• The annual salary of a Director of Operations, Deliberations is $241,500 in SF/NYC, $229,500 in Austin/Boston/LA/Seattle/DC/Chicago and $205,500 in all other cities.
• Benefits and perks also vary based on location.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed