Associate Director, Operations Strategy & Business Intelligence (US)

This role sits inside the Operations Strategy & Business Intelligence function at Code and Theory, a Stagwell company. The team owns the systems, data, and workflows that run the agency — project management, financials, CRM, HR infrastructure — and the BI layer that connects all of it into something leadership can use to make forward-looking decisions. Beyond systems, the team is operationalizing Progressive Delivery across the agency, embedding a suite of internal AI accelerators into how projects are scoped and delivered, and building the automation layer that eliminates manual handoffs across finance, resourcing, and contracts.

We are hiring someone who can do two things well: understand a messy operational problem deeply enough to design a solution, and then build it. That means gathering requirements from stakeholders across Finance, Delivery, Resourcing, HR, and Technology; synthesizing what you hear into a clear plan; and executing against it using automation, agentic tooling, and structured process design. This is a 60% execution role. You will ship things.

The Ops Strategy & BI function at Code and Theory is a small team with a wide mandate. We sit at the intersection of people, process and technology, and our work directly shapes how the agency runs and how leadership makes decisions. The team is early in its maturity, which means you will have real influence over how systems get built and how the function evolves. You will work directly with the Head of Ops Strategy & BI and have regular exposure to Finance, Delivery, Resourcing and executive leadership.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own requirements gathering and workflow design across the agency's operational stack, including project management, financial, CRM, HR, and data infrastructure systems
• Map where manual steps, data handoffs, and system gaps create risk or overhead, and design solutions that address the root cause rather than the symptoms
• Partner with Finance, Resourcing, Delivery, HR, and Technology leads to translate operational pain into structured problem statements and scoped plans
• Design and build agentic workflows and automations using tools including Claude, n8n, Airtable, Python scripting, and AI-native tooling
• Develop and maintain integrations across internal platforms, reducing manual data relay and reporting overhead across finance, HR, delivery, and pipeline functions to support the goal of eliminating manual steps entirely, not just reducing them
• Build lightweight internal agents that surface anomalies, generate narrative summaries, and flag risks from financial, project, and operational data
• Contribute to the AI accelerator portfolio: support scoping, testing, and rollout of internal tools 
• Support development of a centralized data lake and BI layer that ingests from project management, financial, CRM, and HR systems into a single source of truth
• Translate stakeholder reporting needs into clean data requirements, a shared data dictionary, and scalable dashboard logic for Finance, Resourcing, and Delivery
• Contribute to forward-looking operational intelligence: capacity forecasts, margin signals, delivery health, and pipeline trends that inform decisions before they are made, not after
• Support Ops Strat & BI leadership in the initial building of business cases for operational investments: define the problem, size the opportunity, and make the ROI argument with precision
• Communicate plans and progress to stakeholders across levels, from Delivery to Finance, Ops, and executive leadership
• Produce clear documentation, process decks, and implementation briefs that hold up under scrutiny and do not require a meeting to explain

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• 5 to 8 years of experience spanning operations, product, or systems work in a professional services, agency, or technology environment
• Strong operational problem-solving instinct: you can walk into a broken workflow, understand what is actually wrong, and design a fix that addresses root cause rather than symptoms
• Demonstrated ability to gather requirements from stakeholders across different functions, synthesize competing inputs, and turn ambiguity into a scoped plan without losing momentum
• Hands-on experience building agentic workflows or automations; comfort with at least one automation platform and basic scripting (Python and/or JavaScript) is expected
• Enough fluency with operational systems to ramp quickly on new tools; you do not need a certification in any of them, you need the judgment to know what a system should be doing and the ability to figure out why it is not
• Comfort working across a wide surface area without losing track of priority; you triage well and do not wait to be told what matters
• Strong business case instinct: you understand ROI framing, push back on unsourced assumptions, and can write a one-pager that earns a decision
• Clear, concise communicator in writing. You do not over-document. You do not under-explain.
• Experience working with global teams across multiple time zones
• Experience working with commonly used project management platforms such as Adobe Workfront, Smartsheet, Airtable, and Atlassian’s suite of products (including Jira and Confluence)
• Experience with Agile principles and values, and frameworks including Scrum and Kanban to deliver a project
• Practical experience designing and deploying agentic pipelines or AI-assisted workflows in an operational context
• Familiarity with prompt engineering and model behavior sufficient to build reliable internal tooling without engineering support
• Understanding of the difference between automation that runs reliably at scale and a proof-of-concept that works once
• Awareness of data governance and privacy considerations when using AI tools against internal or client data

ABOUT US

Born in 2001, Code and Theory is a digital-first creative agency that sits at the center of creativity and technology. We pride ourselves on not only solving consumer and business problems, but also helping to establish new capabilities for our clients. With a global client roster of Fortune 100s and start-ups alike, we crave the hardest problems to solve. We have teams distributed across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. The Code and Theory global network of agencies is growing and includes Kettle, Instrument, Left Field Labs, Create Group, Current, and TrueLogic.

Striving never to be pigeonholed, we work across every major category: from tech to CPG, financial services to travel & hospitality, government and education to media and publishing. We value the collaboration with our client partners, including but not limited to Adidas, Amazon, Con Edison, Diageo, EY, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lenovo, Marriott, Mars, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and TikTok.

The Code and Theory network is comprised of nearly 2,000 people with 50% engineers and 50% creative talent. We’re always on the lookout for smart, driven, and forward-thinking people to join our team.

The base compensation range for this role is $100,000 – $150,000 and spans multiple levels. We're open to hiring at the level that best matches the right candidate's experience. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, budget, and location.