Strategy and Operations Manager, AI-Native Business Operations

NetApp•San Jose, CA

About The Position

The Strategy and Operations Manager helps leaders in NetApp’s product organization decide how to allocate people and money, and makes those decisions faster and better informed. The role spans planning, forecasting, and tracking people and resources, including budgets for headcount, open requisitions, software, cloud, and AI spend. The analyst is expected to provide a point of view, not just numbers. The role combines strategic consulting, analytical modeling, and AI-enabled process building. Its central output is a better decision, made sooner, using numbers leaders can trust. It is part of the AI-Native Business Operations team within the product organization and reports to the Director, AI-Native Business Operations. The team partners closely with Finance, HR, Talent Acquisition, and engineering leadership across the product organization. The team focuses on outcomes rather than tasks; maintains one trusted, connected source of truth for people, plans, and spend; uses AI to accelerate work while applying human judgment to validate assumptions and outputs; and holds analysts accountable for the method and data as well as the result.

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.
Use AI as the default approach to analysis, writing, and building, with examples to demonstrate this, and build validation into each step to maintain accuracy.
Learn new domains, systems, and data quickly; act without waiting for a complete brief; and work comfortably while a problem is still being defined.
Expertise in scenario and financial modeling, including headcount, cost, and what-if models used by leaders, and judgment to identify incorrect numbers.
A hands-on technical approach to data, including reading data architectures and table schemas, writing joins in SQL or Python, and preparing data by cleaning and deduplicating records and validating formats and keys before using figures.
A track record of influencing directors and vice presidents without authority, with recommendations that were acted on.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to disagree productively and adjust 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 spend across products and investment themes, 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, and identify opportunities to consolidate, renegotiate, or stop spending.
Provide product leadership with a clear point of view based on the numbers, and run planning cycles and leadership reviews.
Turn leadership priorities into working programs by defining scope, setting milestones and checkpoints, building and launching plans, measuring results, and keeping leadership updated.
Build agents, automations, and dashboards using Claude and the team’s other AI tools to reduce effort in recurring work.
Maintain the connected data behind leadership views, including checks and an audit trail that enable figures to be defended to Finance or executive staff.
Partner with Finance, HR, Talent Acquisition, IT, and data owners on access, definitions, and changes, following NetApp standards for privacy and acceptable use.