Operations Associate

About The Role

You'll be the second operator at Paragon. Your hiring manager and partner is our Head of Strategy & Operations, who's spent four years building this function from scratch and wants a partner to extend it. You'll have line-of-sight into every function of the company: people, legal, finance, compliance, recruiting, vendors, IT, and more. Within twelve months, you'll know how Paragon operationally runs better than almost anyone here. It's a real operator role.

Responsibilities

• Employee operations: Run the details behind onboarding, offboarding, access, benefits questions, leave logistics, and employee changes. Keep payroll, benefits, and people data accurate. Turn repeated questions into docs, checklists, and lightweight self-serve resources.
• Compliance operations: Keep the weekly compliance work moving. Translate audit asks into practical next steps for Engineering, Ops, and other owners. Keep enough context documented that someone else can understand what happened without digging through five systems.
• Vendors, contracts, and tools: Keep renewals, signing workflows, vendor accounts, and contract next steps organized. Route agreements through the right review, approval, and signature path. Catch the small problems early: stale seats, unclear owners, bad vendor answers, upcoming renewals, and spend that needs a decision.
• Recruiting support: Keep scheduling, ATS hygiene, debriefs, and candidate communication moving. Help hiring managers run a tight process. Once ramped, help with first-round screens, outbounding, and candidate follow-through where it makes sense.
• Finance ops: Help keep expenses, reimbursements, invoices, cards, and spend review clean. Work the queues and leave a clear trail behind decisions. Make recurring finance work easy to inspect instead of dependent on memory.
• Office + leadership rhythm: Own the basic LA office logistics: visitors, parking, mail, packages, supplies, and light facilities needs. Support All Hands, leadership meetings, monthly reporting, planning cycles, OKR follow-ups, and cross-functional action items. Make loose ends visible so important commitments do not disappear.
• Automations and agents: Notice the repeatable work while you are doing it. Help turn the right candidates into agents, scripts, automations, or better workflows. Keep judgment manual where it matters, and automate the parts that are repetitive, brittle, or easy to miss.

Weekly / Biweekly Rhythms

• Compliance digest and expense queue review
• Payroll and 401(k) review cycles
• Vendor renewal and signing queue review
• Recruiting coordination and debrief support when roles are active
• 1:1s with the Head of Operations to review priorities, escalations, and automation opportunities

The Best Version of This Role

The best version of this role is not someone who merely keeps up with the work. It is someone who turns messy recurring operations into cleaner systems. You're a strong fit if you:

• Have 1-3 years of operations / HR coordinator / EA / BizOps experience at a startup
• Have hands-on PEO or EOR experience (Deel, Rippling, Justworks, or similar)
• Have touched at least one compliance platform (Secureframe, Vanta, Drata, or similar)
• Are a daily Claude / ChatGPT / Cursor user; have shipped at least one automation (Zapier, n8n, Make, Apps Script, custom script - any tool, any complexity)
• Have written at least one SOP, runbook, or process doc that someone else used
• Are fluent with the standard SaaS ops stack (HRIS, ATS, expense cards, MDM, e-signature, knowledge tools); willing to learn whatever's in front of you
• Default to documenting and systematizing rather than memorizing
• Write clearly and patiently in vendor and employee threads
• Operate well without close supervision

Bonus

• Built or contributed to internal tools / agents at a previous job
• Familiarity with Claude Code, Cursor, n8n, Make, Retool
• State leave law knowledge (CA PFL, WA PFML, NY PFL)
• Experience scaling onboarding through 50 to 100 employees
• SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA evidence-gathering experience
• Budget tracking or light variance analysis experience

Compensation Range

$70K - $85K