Director of Business Operations

About this role

DETAILS OF THE ROLE

- Location: Remote (preference for UTC-6 to UTC+5).

- Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances https://mui-org.notion.site/Hiring-FAQ-64763b756ae44c37b47b081f98915501#494af1f358794028beb4b7697b5d3102).

- Level: IC5 Staff and above https://mui-org.notion.site/Leveling-at-MUI-5c30f9bfe65149d697f346447cef9db1.

- We're a remote company, operating mostly asynchronously.

THE COMPANY

MUI's story began in 2014 with Material UI, the most successful React implementation of Google's Material Design. This open-source project has paved the way for the fully-fledged startup known as MUI (founded in 2019), which now boasts an ever-expanding ecosystem of React UI products. We're a company of 40 people as of 2026, and we're growing steadily.

THE PRODUCTS

MUI is best known for our flagship product, Material UI—but this is just one of the UI libraries we maintain. Material UI is complemented by advanced components through MUI X (Data Grid, Charts, Date and Time Pickers, Tree View) for more complex user interactions and data visualization needs. Base UI is our headless component library. We also host Design Kits and pre-built Templates.

THE CULTURE

MUI is a fully remote company with a team that spans the globe. The majority of our work is asynchronous, and we rely on written communication to collaborate. We're radically transparent: a lot of our work happens in public. Each contributor has the freedom to decide how and when they work, and that work is primarily self-directed: it's your responsibility to define and complete your own tasks in a timely manner.

For additional details about the culture, you can check our careers https://mui.com/careers/ and about https://mui.com/about/ pages and also our public Handbook https://mui-org.notion.site/.

WHY WE'RE HIRING

As MUI scales past 40 people, our biggest bottleneck is increasingly execution in business operations. Without a dedicated business operations leader, executive bandwidth gets tied up in day-to-day tasks rather than high-leverage decisions, critical cross-functional projects stall between departments, etc.

We are hiring a Director of Business Operations to offload executive operations from the CEO and build the machinery required for our products to reach their full potential. In this role, you will take on critical initiatives, ensure that cross-functional friction is resolved, and enforce a high bar of execution across the entire business.

Overall, both our open-source community and our premium products are growing fast. We need talented people to keep up with the demands of our exigent community!

WHY THIS IS INTERESTING

You will operate at the intersection of business, revenue, system design (for example, AI), strategy, and organization design. You won't manage processes—you will lead a team that builds scalable foundations, untangles complex cross-functional friction (across Finance, Marketing, Product, Sales, People, Finance, and Engineering), and incubates new capabilities (like RevOps or internal tooling migrations) from 0 to 1.

If you love first-principles problem-solving, data, obsessing over operational details, and building living systems that save organization-wide time at scale, this role offers large autonomy and high strategic leverage. We care deeply about precision, excellence, and deep focus on the inputs (not the outputs): "How you do anything is how you do everything."

Our products empower React developers to build awesome applications faster – we see millions of developers on MUI's docs every year, one million a month.

THE ROLE

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Depending on the day, you'll:

- Track performance & resolve bottlenecks: Monitor company KPIs, detect operational risks early, and deploy targeted interventions to solve root causes across departments.

- Lead operational scaling & systems design: Build, optimize, and automate scalable workflows, OKR cadences, and operating systems. Manage the Operations Engineer and temporarily own critical functions like interim RevOps.

- Lead people: Manage a team of operational contributors (including an operations engineer, people partner, operations manager), unblocking their daily work and setting clear execution standards.

- Drive special projects (0-to-1): Lead high-priority strategic experiments, expansions, or internal turnarounds from inception through execution to smooth handoff.

- Break down cross-functional silos: Facilitate seamless collaboration across Product, Sales, Engineering, and Finance to eliminate friction and increase decision-making velocity.

- Act as an executive proxy & advisor: Partner directly with the CEO and leadership team to offload executive initiatives, align company scorecards, and run core operating forums.

Overall, expect the role to be 60% execution, 40% team management.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

REQUIRED

- High-agency & cross-functional judgment: Self-directed problem solver who thrives in ambiguity and can prioritize among many opportunities. See Manager of one https://mui-org.notion.site/Managers-of-one-00432bb0f6cf4667ae4ce9dd4cca23d3.

- High conscientiousness & detail rigor: Strong commitment to eventually reach no-defect execution; double-checks everything, maintains clean documentation, focuses on friction-free user experiences.

- Executive presence & business acumen: Sound financial judgment, strong understanding of unit economics/gross margins, and the communication skills required to align senior leaders without direct line authority.

- First-principles analytical rigor: Proven track record of breaking down complex, ambiguous operational problems into root causes rather than treating superficial symptoms.

- Hands-on data literacy & systems design: Strong experience designing metrics, operating cadences (OKRs, WBRs/QBRs), and working alongside data/analytics engineers or tool stacks to establish single sources of truth.

-…