Abstract

Knowledge Futures Group is hiring an operations manager to help us streamline and manage our accounting, billing, and membership operations. You’ll get to design systems and solve problems for a growing non-profit technology organization. We will pay you competitively, let you work a 4-day workweek from wherever you want, and take you and your ideas seriously. Join us!

Remote, full-time, $70,000 - $80,000 per year plus benefits, depending on experience

About the KFG

Knowledge Futures Group, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a non-profit institution that builds technology for builds infrastructure for a more effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy.

Operations at KFG

Knowledge Futures is a small, growing non-profit that prioritizes accessibility and sustainable growth. As the first full-time operations hire, you’ll report directly to the Head of Operations and Product and help build, improve, and manage our systems as we scale. You’ll work closely with and help solve problems for all of our teams, especially our growing partnerships and content teams.

About the Role

• Manage the day-to-day finance, sales, and membership operations, including billing, invoicing, expenses, payroll and benefits (mostly provided by TriNet), and customer data management.

• Assess, suggest, and implement improvements to our existing systems and processes, and build new systems as needed.

• Working with our external bookkeepers and the Head of Operations, help keep our budget up-to-date and develop projections as needed.

• Help the leadership team prepare models and documentation for funders, grants, and quarterly board meetings.

• Assist with our yearly non-profit audit.

• Support KFG's antiracism and structural justice data collection and documentation efforts.

About You

• You’re an experienced operations professional with an interest in helping lean mission-driven organizations grow effectively.

• You have at least some daily professional experience managing billing, invoicing, budgeting, payroll and/or benefits at a small- to mid-sized organization.

• You have a solid grounding in the basic tools and systems needed to run a company — spreadsheets, invoicing, expensing, accounting, CRMs, etc.

• You’re interested in low/no-code platforms and have an opinion on when to buy an off-the-shelf solution and when to roll your own.

• You get satisfaction from empowering your coworkers to be more effective.

• You’re ready to work on a small team that will expect you to make and own significant decisions about systems and implementation.

• You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of the needs of a growing organization.

• You have at least a basic understanding of compliance in non-profit organizations.

Working With Us

• Work 4 days per week with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Last summer, we experimented with working 4 days per week (8 hours per day), and never looked back. Learn more about how we work in our Handbook. As it becomes safe to travel and gather again, we are resuming our roughly biannual in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S., which began with our Vermont retreat in the fall of 2021.

• Enjoy industry-standard perks: unlimited PTO with a yearly minimum, your own computer of choice, and the ability to work 4 days per week, fully remote — with regular in-person team retreats as safety allows — with a team that prioritizes remote participation.

• Contribute to our larger mission at the Knowledge Futures Group: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create and access knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, starting with core projects like PubPub and The Underlay. As a KFG team member, you’ll be able to contribute to those efforts as well, and we’ll support any ambitions you might have to publish in our journal, the Commonplace, and beyond.

Apply

If you’re interested, please send us an email with a resume or CV and a brief note or cover letter explaining why you’re interested in KFG and the role and we’ll be in touch!

We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds with diverse skillsets. If you have significant personal experience or engagement with low-income communities, international communities, or fields and languages that are underrepresented in academia, scholarly publishing, or open data, we strongly encourage you to apply. This job description is intended to be a guidepost, not a checklist.

If you feel like you could do a great job in this role, even if you don’t exactly meet every qualification, please consider applying. And if you’re still hesitant after reading this bold text, send us a short note anyway with any questions you have about qualifications.

Eligibility

You must be legally authorized to work in the United States to apply for this role.

_{Cover photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash}