Seeking a highly-motivated, self-directed generalist to lead operations at Learning Alliance, an early stage foundational learning NGO in Uganda. Learning Alliance is midway through a one-year pilot, and we are already serving 20,000 students. We are building a high-growth, evidence-based organization with world-leading cost effectiveness, and we are recruiting early stage leaders who can help us reach more than 1 million students by 2030. The Operations Lead should be detail-oriented, resourceful, and excited both to deliver on key operations functions in a last-mile startup environment, and to develop scalable systems to manage operations as we grow. Prior experience in operations is valuable but not essential – we would equally value backgrounds in fast-moving, problem-solving roles such as management consulting, startup work, etc.

Job Title: Operations Lead

Experience: 1-6 years of work experience suggested. This is an early or early-mid career position for a talented generalist. It could also be a good fit for a motivated career changer. The core skills of this role are proactive problem-solving and systems-building; we therefore welcome experience in operations but equally welcome experience from other self-directed, high-performing roles.

Education Required: Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree (in any field), Master’s welcome but not required.

Reports to: Ilana Kessler, co-founder (solid line manager); Edmund Emulu, Country Manager (dotted line manager – day-to-day ops management and collaboration on some special projects)

Start date: Flexible, ASAP.

Contract status: Full time (40 hours per week). Seeking commitment through Dec 2026, at minimum.

Location: Eastern Uganda (Jinja or Iganga base, with periodic travel to Kampala.) There may be flexibility for some remote work, as long as your primary base is Uganda.

Work visa status: All nationalities may apply.

Language: Fluent English required.

Management responsibilities: Initially, this role is structured as an individual contributor. As the scope of work grows, the Operations Lead may ultimately hire and manage a staff member to implement day-to-day operations tasks.

Salary: We pay in line with highly ambitious, impact-oriented, early-stage non-profits in East Africa. Compensation will be sufficient to live comfortably but modestly in Jinja, Uganda. Exact salary and benefits to be discussed with finalists during the interview process and may vary based on cost of living needs. General guidelines:

Early or early-mid career level: $25,000-40,000 USD/year
Mid-career or strong operations experience: $35,000-50,000 USD/year

Who is Learning Alliance:

Who we are: Learning Alliance is a startup international NGO that partners with primary schools in Uganda to simplify teaching and increase learning. Our mission is to help every student master the foundational academic skills they need to be successful at school, in order to have more success in school and a higher income later in life. We are implementing an evidence-based approach called Structured Pedagogy, which has been found to be highly scalable and cost-effective. We provide teachers with step-by-step daily lesson plans that use easy-to-implement teaching approaches based on the science of how kids learn. The core of our program is the support that we offer teachers through our teacher coaches: Our coaches train teachers on how to use the lesson plans, and then regularly visit classrooms of each teacher to observe and provide mentorship and advice. Our coaches help teachers try out new approaches and instructional routines which are fun and effective, making classrooms a place of joyful learning for students and teachers.

2025 pilot: Learning Alliance has partnered with 75 schools in a district of Eastern Uganda to pilot our program. We are currently a team of 9 staff, including 6 teacher coaches. If the pilot is successful, we expect to grow rapidly, adding more schools, hiring more coaches, and growing our impact, while we experiment with continuous improvements to our program and impact model. The Operations Lead will play a critical role on our leadership team by developing and implementing the systems for our program to run smoothly as we scale.

Detailed job description:

The Operations Lead will play the primary role in implementing and improving on all major operations functions (Finance, HR, Regulatory/Legal, IT). Depending on the candidate’s technical background, this role could also have a substantial data analysis and M&E component. The job has 2 main components:

• Ongoing Operations (30%): Manage and implement recurring operations tasks, including both back office operations and operational aspects of our program.
• Special Projects (70%): Lead or collaborate with colleagues on a variety of projects to improve or systematize operations for scaling. This could include both taking on projects yourself and identifying tasks where we should use an outside vendor.

Ongoing operations (30%): Manage and maintain a variety of ongoing functions. Note that most of these take a few hours or less per month. In some cases, you may be able to delegate some tasks to another team member, such as our Program Support Officer. Primary recurring tasks include:

• Payments: Manage payments and monthly payroll
• Finance: Maintain spending tracking, budget versus actuals spreadsheets, and reimbursement systems, for both our Uganda and US entities.
• Legal: Manage regulatory compliance in collaboration with Country Manager, including tax payments, NSSF registration, and ongoing NGO registration process.
• IT: Manage registration/logins and onboard staff onto our tech stack as needed (Asana, Google Workspace, Kobo, Mailchimp, Wix).
• Partnerships: Manage relationship with vendors such as our website consultant, and fiscal sponsor
• Data: Manage data flows and updates to teacher program enrollment data. *Depending on Operations Lead’s interest and technical skills, data projects and analysis could form a substantial part of the role, or could be led by other team members.
• Events and Logistics: As needed, support program operations such as logistics for coach recruitment, teacher trainings, or partner events.
• Facilities: Ensure our office space is functional, comfortable and stocked with key supplies. Manage some upgrades to office IT infrastructure. (Can be mostly delegated).
• People Operations: Manage a variety of processes such as job applicant management, benefits administration, follow up on staff concerns, ongoing implementation of staff policies, etc.

Special Projects (70%): These projects range from small, one-off improvements to leading major strategic investments in our operations and scalability. For larger projects, you are likely to collaborate with other members of our leadership. For most projects, we expect the work to involve some or all of the following:

• Plan: Propose a project plan or approach, with varying level of detail and planning to match the scope of the project. Seek input from key internal stakeholders and iterate on the proposed plan as needed.
• For research questions: Independently research the topic, such as through contacting vendors or peer orgs, internet research, talking to staff or government partners, or testing options or providing options to staff to test, etc. In some cases, this may involve developing simple spreadsheets to model costs. Bring findings in an organized format, along with key recommendations and rationale. Check in on direction periodically during the project and iterate approach as needed.
• For larger initiatives: Develop and implement project plan, including developing any supplementary materials such as data tracking tools, talking points, clear team instructions, budgets, etc. Lead implementation, and bring in other team members to support you as needed (or support another team member, if they are leading the initiative). Identify success criteria and data to track, and conduct a post-mortem to identify whether we should improve.
• For development of policies and procedures: Develop an understanding of what’s needed through discussion with team members, sourcing similar policies from other orgs if appropriate, and identifying any specific considerations. Develop procedure or policy, and seek staff/leadership input to iterate before implementation.
• Pilot before launching: In the case of larger operations projects or investments, we may want to develop an MVP version of the idea and pilot it briefly or at small scale prior to committing to it. You will be in charge of developing the MVP, piloting it, identifying opportunities to improve it, and recommending whether to go ahead with it permanently or go back to the drawing board.

Example special projects: Below are examples of the wide variety of projects you might take on in your first 6 months. There is some scope for matching projects to your skills and interests, as long as they also match Learning Alliance priorities.

• Talent: Iterate on our teacher coach recruitment and hiring process, optimizing our process to identify high-performing candidates in a replicable, scalable way. Build tools for easily tracking 100s of candidates, and manage the hiring process.
• Data systems: Our program generates a great deal of data about students, teachers, and coaches, and a talented data professional can help us manage data flows as well as analyzing data for program improvements. One upcoming project is to improve our systems for tracking teacher enrollment in our program, as mid-year teacher transfers between schools are a common challenge. You’ll work on developing a system for tracking these teacher changes and ensuring that our dashboard and coach management tools reflect teacher changes throughout the year. You may also lead data analysis projects around teacher performance and program engagement.
• Payment systems: Research and implement systems for making and tracking electronic payments in a field setting at scale, such as sending transport reimbursements to teachers who attend our training.
• Financial Management: Build out a full system for managing our financials, such as double-entry bookkeeping, tracking budget versus actuals, and conducting periodic strategic analysis of our spending. Identify and collaborate with external bookkeeping service to set up auditable payment systems.
• Policy and benefits development: Research legal requirements and policies at peer organizations in order to develop a policy manual covering critical policies such as child protection and staff absences, as well as compensation expectations such as coach salaries, health insurance, and attendance.

Who should apply:

This role has very few required qualifications, and we are open to a wide variety of applicants and experience levels, as long as you’re excited about operations work. The ideal candidate is a values-aligned generalist with a history of working in high-achieving professional environments. If the “desired skills, strengths, and personal characteristics” sounds like you, please apply!

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree required (in any field). Additional education welcome but not required.
• 1-6 years of work experience required, more welcome. We welcome experience in operations, but would be equally excited about candidates with experience working in any self-directed, fast-moving field.

Desired Skills, Strengths, and Personal Characteristics:

• Highly conscientious and detail-oriented. You’ll be handling key data and financial systems for our team, and you take responsibility to get things right.
• Self-directed and driven to results. You’ll have plenty of support from our Country Manager and Co-Founder as needed, but the core of the job involves independently developing and delivering on novel operational challenges.
• Resourceful. We don’t expect that applicants will be expert across all the types of projects that our Operations Lead will take on. Instead, you should be comfortable figuring out how to do new projects by surveying vendors, reaching out to experts, and networking with peer organizations.
• Natural systems-builder. When you execute on a project, you see ways to improve and systematize it, and you’re eager to build repeatable and scalable processes for our organization.
• Strong project manager. You can plan out your initiatives fairly independently, develop materials and timelines, and deliver strong results.
• Excited to build for an LMIC (Low or Middle Income Country) work environment. You’ll face some challenges unique to operations in LMICs (e.g. less reliable internet, challenging transport logistics, building scalable systems that operate at very low unit cost). These challenges are core to the work, so we hope the right candidate finds them interesting and motivating.
• Excited to build in an early-stage environment. Our pilot operations currently run fairly smoothly, but without the built-out systems, policies, or specialized support teams of a larger organization. You’re happy to manage some operations functions in the “good enough” stage, while helping upgrade and systematize others as we prioritize them.
• Collaborative. You’ll do a mix of independently leading projects, and collaborating with internal colleagues and external contractors to deliver on key operations functions.
• Values-driven. Passionate about helping every student learn as a pathway to a better future. (See our values here.)
• Flexible and humble. You are eager for professional growth through advice and feedback, and are equally happy to contribute to colleagues’ growth.

Who might not be a fit:

Not every role is right for every person! Here are some common reasons why a talented, values-aligned person might not be a fit for this particular role:

• If you don’t want to (or can’t) be based in Eastern Uganda.
• If you really want to work on programs, not operations.
• If you prefer working in an established work environment that already has set policies, and has a clear operations expert to train you.
• If you love to work on new projects but don’t like details or follow through.
• If your primary goal at your job is to maximize your earning potential. (We think you can have a great quality of life in Uganda on our salaries, but if maximizing income is your main goal, you can probably make more elsewhere.)

Why we hope you’ll love this job:

• Impact at scale: The Operations Lead will drive the organizational engine and growth that allows us to deliver improved life prospects to 20,000 children (2025), and 1 million or more children by 2030. As an early stage lead of core functions, you will have a particularly high counterfactual impact – your effectiveness in the role will be one of the decisive factors that allow us to deliver on our programs and scale to match our impact ambitions.
• Rare org-building and leadership opportunity: Opportunity to be part of building a new organization from scratch, including designing our operations for scale. Potential to grow into a leadership position overseeing one or more operations departments. For the right person, we hope that this is a dream job!
• Professional growth and learning: As an early stage employee working across many functions, you’ll have the opportunity to lead on a wide variety of projects from day 1. If you’re new to the operations space, this is an opportunity for a lot of learning-by-doing, rapidly attaining mastery of new areas, and trying out different types of projects. We will be highly invested in your professional development, including twice-yearly reviews and ongoing mentorship from our Country Manager and Co-Founder. As we scale, there is potential for this role to specialize in one operations area, or to oversee additional team members.
• Team: Positive, collaborative, fun, values-driven, high-trust team.
• Flexibility: This role has a lot of flexibility to set your own schedule, decide your priorities, take vacation as you need it, and (periodically) work in locations of your choosing.
• Early stage dynamism + work-life balance: While Learning Alliance has a lot of the benefits of an early stage organization (close-knit team, lots of growth opportunity, direct impact, fast-moving, etc.), our operations are stable and running smoothly. Staff typically work 40 hour weeks, with only occasional needs for weekend or off-hours work.