Operations Manager at Taimaka

Taimaka is a highly cost-effective, Founder’s Pledge recommended nonprofit that delivers reimagined pediatric malnutrition treatment to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children. We implement a modified form of community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) treatment targeting children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Gombe State, Nigeria. We are currently dramatically expanding our treatment program to reach 15k patients with SAM in 2025, 25k patients in 2026, and 35k patients in 2027.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Operations Manager

Location: Gombe
Employment Type: Full-time
Expected Hours: 40 hours/week (full time)
Reports To: Executive Director
Supervises: Admin Officer; liaises with external bookkeepers and contractors
Start Date: As soon as possible, ideally February 2025.

Summary

• We’re looking for a talented mid career professional to help manage Taimaka’s operations team. You’ll oversee our finance, HR, and compliance activities in Nigeria. You’ll be supported by an operations contractor who can help instruct you in the technical aspects of your role, as well as our Executive Director, who will assist with setting priorities for the Operations Team (though we expect you to do a lot of independent prioritization).
• With Taimaka on track to treat 75,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition in U5 children in the next three years, your work will be critical in keeping our organization’s growth on track so that we can deliver for our patients.
• We want someone who can learn by doing, can solve problems from first principles, and is comfortable working and setting priorities independently. Good candidates will have substantial past experience managing operations for large organizations (see About You section below).

About the Job

• Taimaka’s operations team supports the rest of Taimaka’s work by creating key systems and overseeing human resources and finance. Operations’ job is to worry about everything our program team or research team does not have expertise or capacity to so that the whole organization can carry out the business of saving lives as effectively and efficiently as possible.
• Our Operations team currently consists of ~1.5 FTE: our Admin Officer in Nigeria, who carries out day to day tasks in Nigeria like initiating payments and managing our office, an operations contractor, who handles bookkeeping, legal filings, and other compliance tasks, and our Executive Director, who backfills additional capacity on some of these tasks.
• The Operations Manager (this job) is designed to substantially increase the capacity on this team, and take charge of most of these activities.
• You would oversee the Admin Officer and assist in their professional development, take over some of the operations contractor’s responsibilities (ramping up over time depending on how much spare capacity you have), and help set priorities for this team (instead of our Executive Director, who has a limited amount of time to spare for operations).
• You would also work on projects we currently do not have the capacity to undertake, like improving our payment and expense tracking system or procuring key commodities from overseas (where they may be substantially cheaper).

Specific Responsibilities
Human Resources and HR Systems - 25% of your time:

• Proactively propose and develop comprehensive HR policies (promotion frameworks, salary inflation adjustments in Nigeria, fraud whistleblowing, child safeguarding, sexual harassment, etc.). Create and oversee reporting lines for breaches of policies, and monitor compliance with policies.
• Onboard new employees, reinforcing key organizational values.
• Iterate on our hiring protocols and practices and facilitate individual hiring rounds by writing job descriptions, designing test tasks with input from managers, etc.
• Help systematize performance reviews across the organization by developing standard review templates, training modules for managers on how to conduct performance reviews, and a framework to ensure performance reviews are conducted with fidelity.
• Create systems to assess staff satisfaction and collect feedback from staff.

Financial Management and Compliance - 25% of your time:

• Create and manage improved systems to track expense and payment requests. Ensure payments are being released to staff and vendors in a timely manner. Assist in processing payments.
• Either perform bookkeeping yourself in QuickBooks for our Nigerian entities or liaise with an external bookkeeper to do so.
• Manage the technical aspects of the budget creation process, and ensure that budgets across the organization are prepared in a standardized manner. Provide monthly reports on budgeted vs. actual expenditures.
• Coordinate with our legal counsel in Nigeria to ensure Nigerian compliance filings are completed in a timely manner.

Logistics and Procurement - 10% of your time:

• Work with our logistics team in Nigeria to improve their systems and practices, e.g. by developing a system that tracks procurement requests from request to approval to purchase to delivery in a way that is visible to our whole team.
• Coordinate overseas procurement when necessary (e.g., by managing the purchase of RUTF from non-Nigerian suppliers and shipping those supplies to Nigeria).

Travel, Housing, and Office Administration - 10% of your time:

• Oversee the Admin Officer in Nigeria in managing our office in Gombe and the housing we maintain for staff in Gombe. Ensure constant supply of internet, electricity, water, etc. Establish points of contact for staff for maintenance issues, etc.
• Coordinate cost-efficient travel arrangements for staff.
• Manage visa process for personnel traveling to Nigeria.

Administrative Staff Oversight - 10% of your time:

• Supervise administrative staff (e.g., the Admin Officer in Nigeria), conducting weekly check-ins, setting clear expectations, and evaluating their performance.
• Coordinate with external contractors, like bookkeepers, accountants, and legal services providers.
• Work with the Executive Director to set quarterly goals for the operations team, and translate those quarterly goals into monthly goals.

Ad Hoc Tasks - 20% of your time:

• We think a lot of the benefit of having a full-time operations staffer will be to serve as a utility infielder of sorts, handling new problems as they arise. We expect that you will jump into new tasks and learn by doing.

Future Growth Trajectories
Future growth trajectories for excelling hires could look like:

• Overseeing a growing team and budget as our organization grows and our operations needs expand with it.
• Specializing in a specific area of operations, like HR or finance, as our needs grow.
• If you don’t want to stay in operations, garnering hands-on experience with humanitarian programming that you could parlay into another role or into starting your own organization.

About You

• This is a position for a mid career operations specialist. We are looking to hire someone with a lot of talent and potential who can grow with us as we expand.

Must Haves:
Candidates must have the following to qualify:

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher

Experience:

• Past work in finance, accounting, legal compliance, HR, or similar admin tasks, where you:

  • Worked at a company with more than 50 employees and more than 750 million naira in annual revenue
  • Oversaw the work of at least 2 other employees
  • Designed and implemented new systems to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of finance, accounting, compliance, HR, or admin tasks (and can speak to the specifics of how you were critical in making these new systems happen)
• An ability to learn new skills, particularly by diving in headfirst and learning by doing
• An ability to set your own priorities and independently solve problems
• Is a highly organized, conscientious person
• Is general tech-savvy, and has used or is willing to learn tools like Google Workspace, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, etc.

Nice to Haves:
The more of these that describe you, the better, but none are required. Even if none of these describe you, but you feel like you are talented and can learn, err on the side of applying.

• 5 years or more of work experience

Education:

• We're not sure how good of a predictor education will be for this role, but applications may be helped by a masters degree in a field related to business administration.

Why Work At Taimaka

• A job with a large, tangible impact on the world - your work will drive a highly cost-effective global health program and save lives
• A high degree of autonomy and opportunity to shape Taimaka and our work as we continue a period of rapid growth
• A passionate and dynamic startup culture, with talented colleagues and the opportunity to take ownership of meaningful projects
• Challenging, but rewarding and stimulating work.

Why Not Work At Taimaka
Working at Taimaka may not be the right fit for everyone! If you aren’t comfortable with the following, this may not be the right job for you:

• Dealing with ambiguity

  • Taimaka is a maturing startup: there is a lot less bureaucracy and oversight than you would find at a larger organization.
  • This can be good, in the sense that you can get hands on with projects and move fast, but it also means that you will typically receive less support from your manager than you might expect. You will need to set your own priorities and do a lot of independent problem solving in order to succeed.

Compensation
N1,000,000 - N3,000,000 million Naira per month, depending on skills and experience. We may be willing to exceed this range for exceptional candidates.

Application Closing Date
31st January, 2025.

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online

Note

• Taimaka does not charge a fee at any point in the application process.
• Applications may close sooner if a suitable candidate is found.