Senior Director, KF Operations - Planning

Senior Director, KF Operations - Planning

The Senior Director, KF Operations – Planning owns the Foundation's strategy and planning operating rhythm to ensure clarity, alignment, and long-term coherence to the KIPP 2030 plan. Reporting to the SVP, People & Ops, this role serves as the connective tissue between strategy, execution, and governance ensuring disciplined planning cycles and effective processes to measure outcomes for our work. This role will partner closely with senior leaders and functional planning owners across KF to drive annual and multi-year planning, monitor organizational performance, and steward governance of the Foundation's long-range strategy (including the 2030 Plan). This is a high-impact role for a systems-oriented leader who can balance strategic thinking with operational rigor.

Responsibilities include:

• Steward the KIPP Network's 2030 Plan, maintaining coherence between long-term commitments and near-term execution and building processes to reflect and update long-term strategy and ensure 2030 priorities are reflected in annual plans.
• Own and continuously improve the annual planning process, ensuring alignment between long-term strategy, team annual priorities and initiatives, and resource decisions.
• Design clear planning guidance, timelines, and decision points for teams.
• Prepare clear materials and decision-making protocols to land annual org priorities and resourcing decisions.
• Steward annual planning project team to ensure coherent, aligned processes including finance, talent, One KIPP Delivery, and other KF teammates.
• Serve as the central coordinator for planning leads across functions, ensuring shared standards, consistency, and cross-functional alignment.
• Facilitate structured planning forums to surface interdependencies, resolve tensions, and drive enterprise-level decisions.
• Own the Foundation's approach to organizational OKRs and KPIs, including definitions, standards, and annual refresh cycles.
• Coordinate collection and synthesis of enterprise performance data, ensuring clarity and comparability across teams.
• Monitor progress quarterly against organizational goals and flag trends for senior leaders.
• Design and facilitate quarterly stepbacks that enable leaders to assess progress, adapt priorities, and respond to emerging realities.

Qualifications include:

• Mission and Student Focus: Demonstrates passion and commitment to KIPP's mission and possesses the desire and ability to uphold KIPP's core values (Focus on Excellent Results, Collective Impact, and Courageous Action)
• Self-Management: Demonstrated record of setting ambitious goals and achieving them with consistency. Invests in developing teammates' skills and mindsets to address gaps in achieving team growth; determines what quantitative and qualitative data are most relevant to their goals and supports the team in creating and monitoring systems for collecting, reviewing, and acting upon data to drive outcomes; able to monitor progress, communicating status to the right stakeholders and adjusting plans and use of time to ensure systems are yielding desired outcomes.
• Work Management: Sets a clear vision for new or complex bodies of work. Develops and implements agile project plans, navigating difficult situations or conflicts while maintaining effective relationships with all stakeholders; creates and ensures systems are in place for knowledge management.
• Continuous Learning: Engages in the work of personal development at work, knowing that personal development is ongoing and vital to their personal and professional success; hold themself accountable to evolving, growing, learning, and unlearning in ways that improve results for students, adults, and the larger community.
• Process Management: Able to build and align goals and project plans with organization priorities; leverages relevant organizational processes and systems to execute work; can build and maintain knowledge management systems; effectively develops and codifies cross-team processes relevant to their team's work that improve work quality and efficiency; uses data to drive process improvements in support of organizational priorities.
• Collaboration: Has the interpersonal, diplomatic, relationship building, and communications skills needed to develop successful working relationships with diverse constituents to deliver results. Evolves and adapts plans and approach with diverse stakeholders to drive results. Possesses excellent communication skills with aptitude for translating complex information into a clear and persuasive narratives that convince others by identifying benefits for all.
• Critical Thinking & Judgement: Nimble, analytical thinker with strong judgment; able to synthesize complex information, leverage data for decision-making, and develop creative solutions; exercises integrity, discretion, and sound judgment in high-stakes and sensitive contexts.

Experience and qualifications include:

• 7+ years of professional experience, including 3+ years in strategy, planning, operations, or related roles, preferably in complex, mission-driven organizations.
• Demonstrated experience owning org-wide planning processes and coordinating across multiple functional leaders.
• Strong strategic thinking paired with the ability to design and run disciplined operating rhythms.
• Exceptional facilitation, synthesis, and written communication skills.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and influencing without direct authority.

Additional Information

Work conditions include:

• Travel: High Travel: 21-30% (40-60 days per year)
• Full, exempt role

Location:

It is preferred, but not mandatory for this role to be based out of a KIPP Foundation office. This role also has the option of working from a remote office full-time. KIPP Foundation offices are in NYC and Chicago.

Compensation and benefits:

In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors, including but not limited to external market data, internal equity, and relevant experience. The salary range for this position is $156,000 - $188,500. In addition, KIPP Foundation provides a variety of benefits to employees, including:

• 25 holidays for + 18 days additional flexible PTO days (flexible PTO increases to 23 days for years 3 and 4 and to 28 days for years 5+).
• 100% paid parental leave
• 100% coverage of the premium for employee and 75% for employee + family's medical/dental/vision plans.
• Wellness benefits such as fitness reimbursements, discounted tickets to theme parks/attractions, backup care support for children and adults/elders, and our employee assistance program
• Finance Security benefits include such as a 401K retirement plan with 4% match, employer-sponsored legal plans, life/disability insurance, and flexible spending accounts

KIPP Foundation embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of the students and communities with whom we work and the world that's around them. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.