Product Operations Lead

Every platform runs on two things: the software you ship and the operations that keep it running. At Nectar, those two things are inseparable. When an SMS doesn't go out to a Medicaid member who was expecting a food delivery confirmation, that's not just a tech incident. It's a real person who needed something and didn't get it. We're building fast, with a small team and a lean, agentic build pipeline. We have product leaders, designers, engineers, and a data scientist. What we don't have yet is the person whose job is to make sure the machine keeps running while we build. That's this role. The Product Operations Lead sits at the intersection of product, quality, and platform ops. You'll own the day‑to‑day health of our platform: making sure what we ship works, catching what doesn't before it hits real users, keeping our partners and members supported, and turning recurring manual effort into automated systems. You'll also feed insight back into the product – the signals you see from the front lines of operations are some of the most valuable data we have. There's no playbook for this yet. You'll help write it. And over time, you'll help build the orchestration layer that connects how our team works including across people, tools, and agentic systems. Why This Matters Nectar connects food‑insecure Medicaid members with food pantries, nutrition programs, and community‑based organizations across Chicago and beyond. Our platform is the connective tissue between healthcare systems, community food networks, and the neighbors they both serve. The people who depend on our platform aren't always in a position to wait out a bug or retry a failed message. When something breaks on our end, it ripples out into someone's week in a way that a glitch at a typical SaaS company simply doesn't. That's the standard we hold ourselves to – and it's the standard this role upholds. What You’ll Do Own platform operations day to day Monitor platform health and triage incidents when they arise. You're the person who notices the SMS failure before the customer calls. Handle support requests from our partners – food pantries, MCOs, community organizations – and act as a reliable, knowledgeable point of contact. Track open issues, elevate what needs escalating, and close the loop on resolutions. Build runbooks and operating procedures so that recurring situations have a clear, documented path. Drive quality across every release Perform user acceptance testing (UAT) on new builds before they reach real users. This is hands‑on, human‑in‑the‑loop testing, not writing automated test scripts. Validate that what ships matches what was spec­ed. Catch gaps, edge cases, and regressions. Document findings and communicate them clearly to product and engineering. Over time, partner with engineering to define and build out end‑to‑end automated test coverage. Write specs that power the build pipeline Translate product needs, partner feedback, and operational learnings into clear, detailed tickets that our agentic build pipeline can act on. Precision matters here. A vague spec produces vague software. You'll learn to write specs that leave nothing ambiguous. Work closely with the Head of Product, Product Owners, and Engineering to refine requirements before work begins. Turn operational signals into product insight The front lines of ops are where product problems show up first. You'll synthesize what you see – support patterns, delivery friction, partner feedback – and surface insight that shapes prioritization and product decisions. Move the team from status updates toward insight generation: connecting signals across our platform and partners into something actionable. Over time, help establish shared visibility across roadmap progress, delivery health, and cross‑functional dependencies. Build systems, not workarounds When you hit a recurring problem, your instinct should be to solve it once, not patch it repeatedly. Reach for LLM and agentic tools to automate manual workflows. This team uses AI to build software; you should use it to run operations. Your long‑term goal is to automate yourself out of the manual parts of this job – and into higher‑leverage orchestration work. What This Role Is Not Not a QA backlog manager. You're not triaging a queue of tickets someone else defines. You own quality end to end. Not a ticket dispatcher. Writing specs isn't administrative – it's one of the highest‑leverage things you'll do. Not a support coordinator. Customer and partner relationships run through you, but you're also responsible for making sure the same support issues stop recurring. Not a project manager. You're not tracking other people's work. You're running operations and building the systems that make execution better. This role owns how the product organization runs day to day – and evolves that system over time toward something more automated, more intelligent, and more scalable. What Success Looks Like 90 Days Platform runs with clear ownership – incidents are caught, triaged, and resolved with a documented path. UAT is a real gate, not a formality. Releases are tested against specs before they reach users. Partners and members have a reliable point of contact and feel it. You've shipped at least one runbook or operating procedure that replaces tribal knowledge. 6 Months Operational signals are feeding back into product decisions. You're surfacing patterns, not just closing tickets. Spec quality has measurably improved. The build pipeline is producing better output because the inputs are sharper. At least one recurring manual workflow has been automated using LLM or agentic tools. Early visibility exists across delivery health and cross‑team dependencies. 12+ Months You've moved from running manual ops to designing and overseeing systems that run themselves. End‑to‑end automated test coverage is underway in partnership with engineering. Nectar operates as an increasingly orchestrated system – you're helping define what that looks like across humans, tools, and agents. This role has grown with the platform. You helped write the playbook. Who You Are You're wired to own things end to end. You notice when something is broken, and you don't wait to be assigned a ticket to fix it. You're precise. Writing a spec that an automated system will execute literally, or testing software against a set of expectations, both require sharp attention to detail. You have it. You see patterns. You can connect signals across support queues, delivery friction, and partner feedback, and translate them into insight that changes how the team builds. You're comfortable in ambiguity. Startups are not always orderly. Priorities shift. You can make progress without a fully defined map. You're genuinely good with people. You'll represent Nectar to partners and members who are counting on the platform to work. You communicate clearly, stay calm under pressure, and follow through. You're curious about AI. You're already experimenting with LLMs and automation tools, and you're excited to make them a core part of how you operate – not as a novelty, but as actual leverage. You care about the mission. Not as a checkbox, but as a reason to do the work well. We care more about how you think and build than where you've been. That said, relevant experience includes: Work in product operations, technical support, QA or UAT, project coordination, or a role that blended several of these Hands‑on time with LLM tools: ChatGPT, Claude, agentic coding platforms, or workflow automation tools like Zapier, Make, or n8n Experience writing detailed requirements, user stories, or specifications that others build from A track record of building small automations or workflows to solve your own recurring problems Comfort working cross‑functionally in a fast‑moving startup environment Why This Role Is Worth It It's 2026. The way software gets built is changing faster than most companies have figured out. Nectar is already operating an agentic build pipeline, with AI systems doing work that used to require a full engineering team. The person in this role won't just be keeping the lights on. They'll be defining what it looks like to operate software that is itself partially built by AI. If you're the kind of person who's energized by blank slates, high ownership, hands‑on experimentation, and work that actually matters to the people on the other end of it, this is a rare seat at a rare moment. We're small, we move fast, and we're building something that the charitable food and healthcare systems have been waiting for. Come help us make sure it works. About Nectar Nectar is an AI-enabled platform connecting food‑insecure neighbors, food banks, and Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) for Food is Medicine programs. We sit at the intersection of healthcare and community food networks, built on a five‑year foundation of 25,000+ community‑based organizations and food pantries across the country. We are a small, mission‑driven team building ambitious technology with real impact. We believe that food is the highest‑frequency engagement vector in health, and that the relationships we help build between neighbors, pantries, and health plans are the foundation for something much bigger than a software platform. Chicago, Illinois. Hybrid In‑Office/Remote role. This role is based in Chicago, and candidates must be able to work from our office, located in River North, 2‑3 days per week, or as needed. $90K - $110K annually, plus equity participation. Final compensation will be determined based on experience and qualifications. Medical, dental, and vision benefits 15 days PTO, 10+ paid holidays, and 10 days paid sick leave 401(k) with partial company match Voluntary long‑term disability and life insurance Contact To apply, please submit your resume via LinkedIn or to View email address on click.appcast.io. No recruiters, please. #J-18808-Ljbffr