Senior Director, Business Operations

About the Role

At Engine, we're transforming business travel and doing it with unparalleled speed, heart, and hustle. We're building the operating infrastructure to support our next stage of growth, and we need a Sr. Director of Business Operations to lead that effort. This person will be the architect who will make the whole company run deliberately.

Business Ops at Engine is the strategy and operating arm of the company, not a support function. As the Sr Director of Business Operations, you'll own our planning cycles, resource allocation decisions, and the execution infrastructure behind our most important initiatives. You'll sit at the intersection of strategy, data, and execution, shaping how Engine sets priorities, makes decisions, and moves fast without losing focus. The question you'll answer every day: Is the business pointed in the right direction, and are we executing at pace?

You'll report to the Chief People Officer and work in lockstep partnership with the CEO and Executive Leadership Team (ELT). You'll build and lead a centralized team deployed against our top strategic initiatives and biggest bets to ensure that what we've committed to actually lands.

What You'll Do

• Own Engine's Operating Cadence: Design and run the company-wide planning rhythms (MBRs, QBRs, annual planning) that keep the business aligned. Transition reporting to async models so leadership meetings focus entirely on debates and decisions.
• Drive Strategic Planning & Resource Allocation: Partner with Finance, People, and the ELT to translate company strategy into financial models, headcount plans, and clear enterprise goals.
• Lead High-Stakes Execution: Serve as the DRI for cross-functional "big bets," ensuring the right resources are deployed against our hardest problems, from initial business case through delivery.
• Provide Executive Visibility & Analytics: Drive objective visibility into initiative health. Build the dashboards, telemetry, and reporting pulses that give the ELT a real-time look at the business.
• Serve as an ELT Operating Partner: Synthesize complex data across product, sales, and operations to identify misalignments, unblock bottlenecks, and enable rapid, well-informed executive decision-making.
• Build the Centralized Ops Function: Scale a high-performing pool of Program Managers and Business Operators, allocating them dynamically to where the organization's friction points are highest.
• Embed AI-Driven Efficiency: Champion an AI-first approach to operations. Automate the operating cadence and data collection where possible, ensuring the business gains operational leverage as it scales.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of experience in business operations, corporate strategy, program management or Chief of Staff roles—with a proven track record in a leadership capacity at a high-growth tech or SaaS company.
• A Strategic Operator, Not a Process Imposer: You look at where the business needs to go, challenge assumptions with data, and build minimal structure that enables speed. You understand how to drive operational discipline without defaulting to heavy, rigid planning or dogmatic OKR frameworks. 
• Mastery of Scale: You've owned an annual planning process and cross-functional prioritization cadence at a company experiencing rapid organizational scale.
• Thrives in High-Performance, Low-Consensus Environments: You excel in a blunt, direct, and high-standards culture. You actively prefer radical transparency, candor over comfort, and making the right call over achieving a consensus. 
• Persuasion Through Conviction: Exceptional executive presence. You can synthesize deep complexity into crisp narratives, debate constructively with the ELT, and earn trust through rigorous logic rather than just process design. 
• People Leader & Coach: Experience hiring, structuring, and developing high-performing, versatile teams of operators.
• Extreme Comfort with Ambiguity: You thrive when priorities, structures, and systems are in motion simultaneously, creating order out of chaos without slowing teams down.