Business Operations Associate, AI & Automation

Instawork; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Flexible paid time off

8 paid company holidays annually

Phone stipend

Commuter stipend

Equity eligible

HSAs and FSAs

401K plan

Perkspot discount program

Job summary

Instawork, a growth‑minded labor marketplace, seeks a Business Operations Associate in California to automate comp processes and support quota setting. You’ll turn spreadsheet heavy tasks into AI powered workflows, work closely with RevOps, Finance and Legal, and help design annual comp plans.

New grads with strong internships are welcome, with equity and benefits available. The role emphasizes automation, data integrity, and collaboration, offering ownership and opportunities to ship real

Qualifications

• 0–3 years in an analytical, operational, or cross‑functional business role.
• Strong Excel/Sheets skills and comfort with spreadsheet‑heavy problems.
• Willingness to learn SQL with AI assistance and verify data against sources.
• Clear, professional communication with sales, Finance and Legal.

Responsibilities

• Turn manual comp processes into automated agents, scripts, and workflows.
• Support monthly and quarterly comp cycles with data pulls and reconciliations.
• Help with quarterly target setting, approvals, and timeline tracking.
• Assist with new-hire guarantees and manager comp questions under guidance.
• Maintain weekly/monthly forecast rollups and pipeline dashboards.

Skills

AI automation mindset

SQL basics

Excel/Sheets

Cross-functional comms

Attention to detail

Education

0–3 years in analytical/operational role

Tools

Claude

Cursor

ChatGPT

n8n

Replit

SQL

dbt

Mode/Looker/Tableau

Salesforce

Job description

Instawork is on a mission to create meaningful economic opportunities for skilled hourly professionals in communities around the globe. Our AI-powered labor marketplace helps local businesses scale, and enables global technology companies to push the frontiers of robotics and AI. Backed by world-class investors like Benchmark, Spark Capital, Craft Ventures, Greylock, Y Combinator, and others, we’re looking for exceptional talent to reimagine the way the world works.

We're hiring a Business Operations Associate to support variable pay and quota-setting across our GTM organization — and, more importantly, to help us automate and rebuild how this work gets done using AI. This is a builder's seat: high ownership, a lot of latitude, and real upside for someone who ships. Traditional RevOps experience is a plus, not a prerequisite — what we're optimizing for is an instinct for turning manual, spreadsheet-heavy process into agents and workflows.

Who You Are

Required

• Comfortable using AI tools daily (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, n8n, Replit, or similar), and genuinely excited to get better at directing them to do real work
• A builder's instinct — when you see a manual, repetitive process, your first thought is “how do I automate this,” not just “how do I do this faster”
• 0–3 years of experience in an analytical, operational, or cross-functional business role (revenue operations, sales operations, finance, business/product operations, or similar) — new grads with strong internship experience welcome
• Willingness to learn SQL well enough to draft queries with AI assistance and sanity-check the output against source data — you don't need to arrive fluent
• Strong Excel/Sheets skills and comfort with ambiguous, spreadsheet-heavy problems
• High attention to detail — this role touches people's paychecks, and precision matters
• Clear, professional communication — you'll coordinate directly with sales leaders, Finance, and Legal, and need to hold your own in those conversations

Nice to Have

• Coursework or project experience with SQL, dbt, or BI tools (Mode, Looker, Tableau)
• Exposure to Salesforce or another CRM — this isn't a CRM-admin role, and we'd rather teach Salesforce to a strong builder than teach the automation instinct to a CRM specialist
• A personal project, class project, or internship where you built a script, automation, or tool that saved someone time
• Interest in sales compensation, forecasting, or GTM strategy as a career path

What You'll Do

AI & Agentic Automation

• Partner with the RevOps team to turn manual, spreadsheet-heavy steps of the comp process into small agents, scripts, and workflows — starting with well-scoped pieces, not the whole cycle.
• Examples of what a strong first project might look like: a checklist-style agent that flags obvious mismatches between a payout file and source data, a Replit tool that answers reps' basic crediting questions, an n8n workflow that reminds managers when their target approvals are due.
• Tools we use today: Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, n8n, Replit. No software engineering background required — you'll get support from the team on how to build these. What matters is curiosity and follow-through on shipping something real.

Comp Operations Support

• Support monthly and quarterly comp cycles: pull data, run reconciliation checks, help track down discrepancies, and keep documentation current.
• Help run the quarterly target-setting process — collecting inputs, formatting target packages, tracking approvals, and keeping the timeline on track.
• Assist with new-hire guarantees, crediting exceptions, and manager comp questions, with guidance from senior RevOps and Finance partners as you build judgment on trickier calls.

Forecasting & Pipeline Analytics

• Help maintain weekly and monthly forecast roll-ups and pipeline dashboards (coverage, stage conversion, velocity, aging).
• Pull together data and first-pass analysis for the VP of Sales and CFO ahead of QBRs, under the direction of the senior RevOps lead.

Plan Design & Process Improvement

• Support the annual comp planning cycle — research, drafting, formatting, and coordinating review cycles with Legal and leadership.
• Bring a fresh eye to how the team's processes work today, and pitch specific, scoped improvements as you learn the function.

For CA-based applicants:

The base salary for this position is $90,000 - $130,000.

This position is eligible for equity in the form of stock options.

This position is eligible for Instawork benefits, including:

• Medical, dental, and vision plans with coverage beginning on the date of hire
• Flexible paid time off
• At least 8 paid company holidays annually
• Phone stipend
• Commuter stipend
• Supplemental pay on qualified leaves
• Employee health savings accounts (HSA) contribution
• Flexible spending plans
• 401K plan
• Perkspot - discount program through Lumity

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone's compensation, including a candidate's professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.

Our Values

• Empathy, Trust & Candor We put ourselves in the shoes of our colleagues and customers and don’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations, instead building trust through honest and direct feedback.
• Bias for Action We practice high-velocity decision-making, clear-eyed that we often operate with incomplete information. Growing quickly means it’s OK to be wrong, so long as we learn from our mistakes and course correct!
• Always Be Learning We’re a curious bunch, and with AI transforming our workplace we encourage everyone to learn from each other, compounding our knowledge and experience to help us change an entire industry.
• Act Like an Owner We work long, hard, and smart, building products that delight our users and drive growth. Your ability to impact Instawork is limited only by your courage and conviction, not your job description.

About Instawork

Founded in 2015, Instawork is the nation’s leading online labor marketplace for food services, hospitality, light industry, and logistics, connecting more than 7M skilled workers with local restaurants, hotels, warehouses, stadiums, and more. Our AI-powered platform serves thousands of businesses across more than 50 major markets in the United States and Canada. We're not just helping fill shifts, we're supporting local economies—and we're just getting started!

Instawork has been featured by CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press. Forbes included us on their Next Billion Dollar Startups list; RetailTech Breakthrough named us Workforce Hiring Solution of the Year for 2025; and Inc. 5000 recognized us as one of the country's top 10% fastest-growing companies two years in a row. But what matters most is our impact. We're solving real problems for real people, and we’re doing it at scale.

Join our team to help us build something that matters! We’re looking for superstars who want to help us shape the future of work. With hubs in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Chicago, city offices in New York, Phoenix, and Singapore, we're back to working together in-person five days a week because we believe the best ideas happen when great people collaborate face-to-face. We also value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.

Ready to make an impact? Learn more at www.instawork.com/about.

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