Strategy and Operations Manager, AI-Native Business Operations

NetApp, Inc. • San Jose, CA

8d • $147,900 - $220,000

About The Position

The Strategy and Operations Manager helps leaders in NetApp’s product organization make better, faster-informed decisions about people, resources, and budgets. The role plans, forecasts, and tracks organizational resources and spending across headcount, open requisitions, software, cloud, and AI, and provides recommendations rather than simply reporting figures.

The position combines strategic consulting, rigorous analysis, and hands-on AI-enabled automation. Its objective is to deliver trusted numbers and actionable recommendations that help leaders make decisions sooner. The role is part of the AI-Native Business Operations team within the product organization and reports to the Director, AI-Native Business Operations. It partners closely with Finance, HR, Talent Acquisition, IT, data owners, and engineering leadership across the product organization.

The team emphasizes outcome-focused work, a connected source of truth for people, plans, and spending, AI-assisted work validated by human judgment, and accountability for both the methods and data behind recommendations.

Requirements

• Typically, at least 8 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience, including at least 3 years in consulting.
• Experience may come from a management consulting firm’s strategy, operations, or analytics practice; a business operations, strategy and operations, or FP&A team at an AI-first technology company; or a founding or early operating role at a startup building AI-native products.
• Uses AI as the default approach to analysis, writing, and building, can provide examples, and incorporates validation at each step to preserve accuracy.
• Learns new domains, systems, and data quickly; acts without waiting for a perfect brief and is comfortable working with problems that are still being defined.
• Expertise in scenario and financial modeling, including headcount, cost, and what-if models used for leadership decisions, with the judgment to identify incorrect figures.
• Hands-on data skills, including reading data architectures and table schemas, writing joins in SQL or Python, cleaning and de-duplicating records, and validating formats and keys before using figures.
• Track record of influencing directors and vice presidents without authority and making recommendations that were acted on.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to disagree productively and adjust recommendations as evidence evolves.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Claude Code or Cursor.
• Experience with workforce or finance data in systems such as Workday or Snowflake.

Responsibilities

• Build plans and forecasts for the product organization’s people and resources, and track them monthly, including engineering capacity and spending by product and investment theme, as well as hiring, attrition, and backfills against plan.
• Manage product-organization spending against targets in partnership with Finance, covering headcount, open requisitions, software, cloud, and AI; identify opportunities to consolidate, renegotiate, or stop spending.
• Advise product leadership by translating numbers into recommendations for vice presidents and their staff, and run planning cycles and leadership reviews.
• Operationalize strategic initiatives by defining scope, milestones, checkpoints, and plans; launch programs, measure results, and keep leadership informed.
• Build agents, automations, and dashboards using Claude and the team’s other AI tools to reduce the effort required for recurring work.
• Maintain the connected data behind leadership reporting, including checks and an audit trail that support the accuracy and defensibility of figures.
• Partner with Finance, HR, Talent Acquisition, IT, and data owners on data access, definitions, and changes while following NetApp privacy and acceptable-use standards.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package, which may include health insurance, life insurance, retirement or pension plans, paid time off, leave options, performance-based incentives, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stock units (RSUs); offerings vary by region and are subject to local laws, regulations, and company policies.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior