Director OF Operations

Location: Dallas-based, or able to spend at least 3 weeks per month in Dallas to start. This is a hard requirement. Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside Department: Operations Reports to: CEO About Rare Candy Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one. We're a 10-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team. The Role We're hiring our first Director of Operations to own end-to-end warehouse and fulfillment operations, ensuring hundreds of thousands of cards reach collectors' hands this year. You'll own the physical operation top to bottom: strategy, KPIs, staffing, security, insurance, and throughput. And you'll be the CEO's thought partner on the biggest operational question facing us: how we build fulfillment infrastructure for the next phase of the business. You'll own floor execution, the team, KPIs, processes, security posture, and the recommendation on when to build in-house, partner, or buy as we expand our fulfillment operations. If you've built a high-value warehousing & fulfillment operation from the ground up, know how to scale up operations rapidly, and you get energized by a fast, scrappy environment where you figure things out instead of waiting for a system to be handed to you, this is your role. What Success Looks Like First 30 days: You step into a live operation, quickly diagnose the real processes and operational load the team is carrying today, and ship immediate changes that visibly lift the team's efficiency and output. You earn the floor's trust fast. By day 90, you and the CEO have co-owned a clear recommendation on our fulfillment infrastructure, whether in-house, partner-vault, or hybrid, backed by a long-term operations roadmap that leadership buys into. By the end of year one, the operation reliably handles high-tens-of-thousands of orders per month against several million dollars of revolving inventory, with no slip in accuracy or turnaround time. You've grown the warehouse team from a handful of people to 40 or more, improved efficiency and customer satisfaction, and established the security and insurance posture that a high-value collectibles operation demands. What You'll Do Own the operation end-to-end: pick, pack, ship, receive, store. Set the standards, hit the targets, and treat fulfillment quality as part of the product, not a cost center. Set and hit the KPIs: throughput, ship accuracy, cost per shipment, turnaround time. Define what good looks like, then deliver it. Build and lead the team: grow the warehouse team from a handful to 40 or more, design the staffing and shift model for serious volume, and develop the leaders underneath you. Co-own infrastructure strategy: partner with the CEO to assess build versus partner, capacity planning, and the long-term operations roadmap. Bring a real point of view and the ability to back it up. De-risk the operation: own the security and insurance posture for a high-value collectibles inventory worth tens of millions of dollars. Solve it yourself: operate with high agency. Learn new tools fast, build your own solutions, and unblock your team without routing every problem through engineering. A Day in Your Life at Rare Candy You start on the floor, not at your desk. You walk the operation, check yesterday's accuracy and turnaround numbers, and spot the bottleneck nobody has named yet. Mid-morning, you're deep in a working session with the CEO on the vault-versus-in-house question, pressure-testing each other's assumptions with real numbers. After lunch, you're interviewing for two floor roles and reworking next month's shift model to handle a volume spike. You close the day standing up a new process and documenting it so it scales without you in the room. You Might Be a Fit If You've got 8-10 or more years in operations and fulfillment, including a zero-to-one build or major scale-up you personally drove, not just a slice of a big machine that was already running. You’re a skilled people manager with demonstrated ability to attract, train, and retain top talent both in the warehouse team and across supporting functions. You've scaled a team and an operation through real volume growth, and you know how to do it without sacrificing quality or burning people out. You can reason rigorously about infrastructure decisions, build-versus-partner, capacity, and capital trade-offs, and act as a genuine thought partner, not just an executor. You've protected and insured high-value physical inventory, and you take security seriously. You're extremely scrappy and high-agency. You learn new tools quickly, build your own solutions, and figure things out without waiting for a playbook. You're a sharp, direct communicator who can work shoulder to shoulder with a founder and partner cleanly across the team. Required signal: you know the trading-card or collector world. You collect, you play, or you've got real fluency in an adjacent collectible community. What You'll Need to Thrive Here This is a hands-on operating role at an early-stage company, so the systems aren't all built yet. You'll spend your first weeks on the floor, not behind a desk, and the work swings between high-level infrastructure strategy and rolling up your sleeves to fix a process the same afternoon. The Dallas time is real and required to start, because you can't run a warehouse you're never standing in. If you like ambiguity, ownership, and building the thing rather than inheriting it, you'll do great here. Why Join Us Now Build the operational backbone of a category-defining collecting company, and own the playbook everyone will follow after you. Real ownership from day one: the strategy, the team, the standards, and the infrastructure call. This is the first ops leadership hire, and it's a big one. Work directly with the founder on the decisions that matter most, in a high-trust, low-ego team that ships fast and celebrates wins. Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside. Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend. A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby. How to Apply Apply through our Ashby posting and answer these: Yes or no: Are you based in Dallas, or are you willing to spend at least 3 weeks per month in Dallas for the first 3-6 months? Share one or two operations or fulfillment systems you personally built or scaled. Include volume, team size, accuracy, turnaround time, and before-and-after metrics where you can. Describe a specific time you improved throughput without sacrificing quality. Tell us about your experience with high-value physical inventory, security, loss prevention, insurance, or chain of custody. What's your view on when a company should build fulfillment in-house versus use a partner or hybrid model? Required: what trading-card or collector communities do you understand best? Tell us your favorite card, set, format, or collector niche. Rare Candy is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate individuality, from Pikachu collectors to Planeswalker pros, and are committed to building an inclusive team. #J-18808-Ljbffr