Sr. Business Operations Associate

Senior Business Operations Associate

At January, we're rebuilding consumer finance from the ground up. By personalizing interactions and optimizing decisions across all stages of consumer credit, we're driving superior outcomes for both consumers and creditors, and making sure that credit is fair, accessible, and personal.

About the Role

As Senior Business Operations Associate, you'll diagnose what's slowing January down before it becomes a crisis, build systems that eliminate friction permanently, and design solutions teams can run independently — shifting January toward proactive operational excellence and pushing our vision forward faster, smarter, and more resiliently.

You'll work in an environment where operational friction compounds silently: manual processes slow teams down, cross-functional blockers stall execution, and critical work falls through cracks. Your mandate: identify the highest-leverage problems others aren't seeing, ship solutions that make multiple teams faster and work with higher quality, and ensure everything you build gets adopted and scales without you.

We need someone who sees what others miss, designs for autonomy instead of dependency, and makes the entire company more capable of executing on its strategy through systems that compound.

What You'll Do

Identify and own highest-leverage operational problems

• Proactively surface problems that slow teams down — diagnoses operational friction, cross-functional blockers, and capability gaps before they degrade velocity and execution quality
• Translate symptoms into root cause analyses with clear business impact
• Own high-stakes cross-functional projects — turn ideas with unclear ownership into concrete execution plans with milestones and accountability

Builds systems that eliminate friction and accelerate team velocity and improve quality of decisions

• Design solutions that solve real problems, investing in stakeholder diagnosis upfront, validating needs before building, and incorporating feedback throughout
• Ship solutions rapidly: scope tightly to avoid over-engineering, delivering work in weeks not months
• Create reusable infrastructure that makes multiple teams faster: reduces time on manual work, eliminates coordination bottlenecks, accelerates decision-making

Drives cross-functional execution and learns from results

• Break ambiguous problems into sequenced work: define scope, identify dependencies, establish success criteria, drive to completion
• Build stakeholder alignment and communicate proactively
• Extract lessons from every project for continuous improvement

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 4+ years of experience in a relevant role (e.g. consulting, banking, or BizOps team at a high-growth startup) where you developed strong business acumen, analytical abilities, high quality execution, and excellent communication skills
• Nice to have: experience in consumer fintech or other highly regulated industry

Characteristics

• Strategic problem-solving with ruthless prioritization — you identify high-leverage problems and design scalable solutions that generalize beyond single use cases
• Analytical rigor that drives decisions — you extract insights from messy data, quantify vague problems, and build self-sustaining tools and infrastructure
• Influence without authority — you translate complex ideas into compelling narratives and drive adoption by understanding stakeholder needs and constraints
• Proactive ownership and follow-through — you identify problems and drive solutions to completion without waiting for direction, owning outcomes not just tasks
• Bias toward speed and iteration — you ship working solutions in weeks, move fast on reversible decisions, and maintain momentum despite obstacles
• Comfort operating in ambiguity — you form testable hypotheses with incomplete information and calibrate effort against expected impact

Skills

• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills
• You are highly proficient in SQL and Excel for business analytics and modeling
• You have a deep curiosity for AI and developing novel solutions that simplify

Why Join Us?

This role offers exposure to every part of the business, giving you the mandate to tackle whatever high-leverage problem needs solving next—from strategy to systems to cross-functional execution. At January, you'll have the autonomy to innovate, the support to excel, and the platform to build something extraordinary. If you're driven to push boundaries and thrive in a culture of collaboration, rapid growth, and continuous learning, January offers the chance to do your best work.

We thrive on:

• Writing to clarify thinking, scale collaboration, and drive intentionality.
• Prioritizing impact over routine – this isn't a 9-to-5 job.
• Embracing growth, feedback, and new challenges with humility and curiosity.

As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.