Head of Service Operations (Sr. Manager/Director)

Collective•San Francisco, CA

9d•Remote

About The Position

Collective is on a mission to redefine the way businesses-of-one work. Our technology and team of trusted advisors help members achieve financial independence by taking care of everything from business incorporation to accounting, bookkeeping, tax services, and access to a thriving community, all in one integrated platform. We believe in empowering self-employed people to enjoy the same tax savings that big companies get, so they can focus on their passion, not paperwork. Featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo, Bloomberg, Financial Times, TechCrunch, and more. We are backed by General Catalyst, Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), QED Investors, Google’s Gradient Ventures, Expa, and other investors who have financed iconic companies like YouTube, Substack, Twitch, Box, Hims, Instacart, and Lyft. About the role: The companies that win the next decade in financial services won't be the ones with the best bookkeepers or fastest tax preparers. They'll be the ones that proved the production engine. As Head of Service Operations, you own the line: a financial services operation that runs by design like a manufacturing floor staffed by AI and humans, where bookkeeping and tax preparation move as defined workflows with measurable inputs, outputs, and quality, at volume, every day. You'll run today's operation at full quality and throughput while architecting the shift from volume-based execution to exception-based management, defining what the AI-supervised production floor of an AI-native financial back office actually looks like in practice.

Requirements

10+ years managing high-volume, process-driven operations.
Financial services, fintech, tax services, or professional services at scale preferred.
A manufacturing or industrial operations mindset: you think in throughput, utilization, cycle time, and first-pass yield, not effort and headcount. You live in your production dashboards and act on deviations within hours.
Proven track record running multi-workflow operations where different work types run in parallel and must be balanced dynamically.
Strong people leader with direct experience managing managers. You build a player-coach culture where every leader stays in the work, and you're willing to be in the details yourself.
Familiarity with Lean and Six Sigma principles, statistical process control, root cause analysis, and variance reduction. Formal certification is a plus, not required.
Experience with financial services workflows (accounting, tax, bookkeeping) is strongly preferred. You don't need to be a CPA, but you need to understand how the work flows and what quality looks like.
Comfort in a systems-driven environment where workflows are encoded in tools and your job is to run the system, not redesign it on the fly.
Track record managing against SLAs in a member- or client-facing production environment.
A clear point of view on the AI transition in financial services. You see exception-based management as where this work is going and want to be the one architecting it.

Responsibilities

Own daily execution of the full Service Operations function (bookkeeping and tax preparation) as a single integrated manufacturing system.
Manage a team of line managers and senior managers across all production workflows.
Set clear performance expectations, run tight operating cadences, and develop hands-on leaders who stay close to the work.
Drive daily and weekly production reviews monitoring throughput, SLA adherence, first-pass quality rate, and capacity utilization in real time.
Maintain specialist-level performance data and act on deviations in days, not quarters.
Own backlog recovery: when production falls behind, activate and execute pre-defined recovery playbooks before the problem compounds.
Manage capacity dynamically. Match staffing to inflow forecasts and redistribute specialists across workflow types to eliminate idle capacity and prevent bottlenecks.
Partner with Product Operations to enforce financial quality standards on the floor and surface patterns of failure that indicate standards gaps.
Partner with Strategic Operations to translate floor needs into system improvement requests, lead adoption of new workflows and tools as they ship, and own the feedback loop that proves whether changes are delivering results.
Architect the transition from volume-based execution to exception-based management, the Service Operations of the AI-native era, while running today's operation at full quality and throughput.