VP of Operations

Parkade is modernizing private parking. We are transforming how parking works to create a world with far less parking — one where every parking spot is available at the push of a button.

We are building out a world-class leadership team to take us to the next level. We have just hired a new VP of Sales, Head of Support and Head of Finance, and we are now looking for the next piece of our leadership puzzle: an exceptional operations leader.

We are looking for a strategic, hands-on VP of Operations to help us scale from our current stage to $30M+ in ARR and beyond. You will be the architect of the systems, physical operations, and processes that allow us to deploy Parkade into thousands of new buildings efficiently and reliably.

What You'll Do

• Scale Implementation: Oversee the team that onboards new customers. Reduce the "time-to-live" for new buildings while ensuring a flawless, well-documented setup of gates, maps and access rights.

• Front line to the boardroom. You have no problem rolling up your sleeves when needed, and you’re excited that your onboarding involves you taking customer support shifts and helping new buildings roll out Parkade. But you can also seamlessly shift to presenting at a board meeting, and everything in between.

• Support support: Our growing on-shore customer support org, run by our head of support, will roll up to you. You’ll help this org provide amazing customer service, 24/7 and operationalize how we scale this team.

• Physical Operations Strategy: Manage the logistics of our physical footprint — this includes gate integration hardware, signage deployment, and managing third-party partners (e.g., towing/enforcement networks).

• Vendor & Partner Management: Negotiate and manage relationships with hardware installers, enforcement agencies, and other operational partners to ensure quality and healthy margins.

• Process Optimization: Identify bottlenecks in our internal workflows. Whether it's how we handle refunds or how we configure complex parking rules, you will build the systems to automate or streamline it.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Work with our new VP of Sales to ensure we only sell what we can deliver, and with our Head of Support to reduce ticket volume through better upstream operational processes. This should include the ability to do structured forecasting on operational capacity and have hard conversations with sales on top-of-funnel expectations.

• Unit Economics: Own the "cost to serve." Work with our Head of Finance to drive down the operational costs per building, improving our gross margins as we scale.

• Operationalize experiments: We want to continue innovating with our products, services and business model. You’ll be tasked with taking these ideas from the white board to the real world.

• Visit our customers: We have customers across the country. This isn’t a travel-heavy role, but we do expect you to lead by example and spend at least a portion of your time visiting customers. Both locally in Southern California, and around the country.

About You

• Scale Veteran: You have prior operational leadership experience at a technology startup that scaled from ~$5M to $30M+ ARR. You know and can foresee the typical operational hurdles during this growth phase and how to avoid them.

• Technology focus: The core focus of your career has been working at innovative startups that build technology.

• Physical + Digital: You know and understand businesses that touch the real world. Experience with logistics, prop-tech, business have real-world impact or marketplace operations is essential.

• Process Architect: You love taking a chaotic, manual process (like onboarding a new building or setting up gate access) and turning it into a streamlined, repeatable playbook.

• Data-Driven: You are comfortable with complex data. You can look at unit economics, implementation times, and vendor costs to make high-level strategic decisions.

• Cross-Functional Leader: You can effectively collaborate with product to automate manual tasks, sales to streamline handoffs, and finance to manage margins.

• Aspirations for COO. We want someone ambitious. We’re not hiring at a COO level yet, but plan to bring on a COO down the road as we scale. We’d love to find someone who has ambitions for that role, here or elsewhere, as you could be offered it here if you prove yourself an exceptional leader.

Preferred qualifications

• You have 15+ years of experience leading customer support and/or operational teams in a tech-forward, user-centric environment

• You have proven success managing large, distributed teams and overseeing complex global operations with high precision and accountability

• Familiarity with companies that process payments. Parkade processes millions of dollars in parking revenue each month, and it’s hugely important for our VP of operations to have familiarity with everything involved with that.

Interview process

• First call with our recruiter

• 30 mins with our CEO

• 30 mins with our head of finance

• Panel

  • 30 min group presentation (10 min intro, 20 mins on how you solved the biggest operational challenge of your career), w/ CTO too

  • 1 hour with our former head of ops-turned-product manager

  • 30 mins with manager of special projects

  • 1 hour with head of support

  • 1 hour with our CEO

  • 45 mins with head of finance

  • 1 hour with VP of sales

• 1 hour final CEO interview

Fundraising history

• Raised $17M since inception from tier-1 generalist VCs (CRV), the best proptech specialist investor (Navitas Capital), a Fortune 100 financial services firm (MassMutual Ventures), and other elite investors like (9Yards, BoxGroup, and Heartland Ventures).

About the Founders

• Our CEO Evan Goldin was the first product manager at Lyft, and then ran product, design, data and engineering at on-demand shuttle startup Chariot, which was acquired by Ford.

• Our CTO Ben Plowman was the mobile engineering lead at peer-to-peer car-sharing startup Getaround. Prior to that, he was a software engineer at Ning, where he met Evan, from 2009 to 2013.

Location

We are a mix of a remote and in-person team, with a strong culture of collaboration. Our leadership team generally works on-site out of our San Francisco (Mission) and LA (Long Beach) offices. With our CEO in LA, we’re looking for someone in this role to sit shoulder to shoulder with him, and be based in LA.

We are not considering remote hires for this role.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance (80% for you and dependents).

• Flexible vacation policy

• FSA/HSA

• 401k

• ​​Paid family leave