Business Operations Manager / Associate

🇿🇦 Up to ZAR 550,000 salary, depending on experience, on a full time, permanent employment contract 
🌎 Fully remote working from anywhere in South Africa!
🏖️ 33 days paid leave and Benefits
✨ Working with globally recognisable brands in US Entertainment  
💻 High-end, fast computer  
💡 All the latest software and productivity tools you’ll need
About the Role 

• You'll work directly with the Head of Ops. Working directly together to drive things forward — no layers between you and the person who can say yes, we aim to operate with 0 bureaucracy and bloat (ultimately you will say yes yourself with the least amount of friction). Spot something worth fixing, make the case, make it happen.
• You'll learn quickly. The remit cuts across the whole business — people, money, tooling, process — so you'll see how a company actually runs, and pick it up faster here than almost anywhere else.
• You'll build things that stick. The automations, processes, and savings you deliver become how the company runs.

About Storm Ideas 

Founded in 2008, Storm Ideas is an international team working with globally recognised clients, particularly across the US TV and entertainment industry.

Our work sits at the intersection of media, technology, creativity, and operations. We produce social content at scale, support major entertainment brands, build products, and keep improving how our teams work.

We are a remote-first, fast-moving company with established clients, an international team, and a strong appetite for better tools, better systems, and better ways of working.

We use modern technology, including carefully selected AI-assisted tools, to create clearer workflows, make better decisions, catch problems earlier, and deliver consistently high-quality work.
The Kind Of Work Across This Role

Not one person does all of this — it's a spread of what the operations function owns, and where you go deepest depends on your level and strengths. As examples:

• People operations. Contracts, onboarding, policies, and the day-to-day of employing people well — getting it right without drowning it in process.
• Finance operations. Invoicing, expenses, payroll inputs, cashflow — keeping the numbers moving and noticing what they're telling us. No formal finance knowledge needed; being numerate and willing to dig in is what counts.
• Efficiency and improvement. Finding the manual, the slow, and the duplicated — then killing it. We're AI-first: we build our own tooling and automations rather than waiting for someone else to.
• Cost. SaaS, AI, and cloud billing — owning what we spend, finding the waste, and cutting it. We treat every line item as negotiable.

Who We Are After

We care more about the person than any specific list above, which will change. We're hiring for ceiling and raw ability.
You're a high-agency doer who moves things. You're comfortable owning ambiguity and you'd rather ship something rough and improve it than write a plan about shipping it later. Handed a problem you haven't seen before, you take the initiative, work out the right answer, and deliver it. You can read a contract, build a spreadsheet model, automate a workflow, and negotiate a renewal in the same week — and you're already using AI to move faster.
You might have built or run something of your own — a startup, a small business, a product, a team — or worked somewhere fast and high-growth where the scope was undefined and you liked it that way. If you've been inside a startup or tech company before, even better — that's the mentality we run on.
We're Open At More Than One Level

• More junior: you run the day-to-day machinery under direction — finance processes, people ops, cost tracking, building the automations that make it all faster. Sharp, fast, hungry to take on more.
• More senior: you own a remit and set the direction — people, finance, cost, tooling. You've carried this kind of breadth before.

Either way, the scope is big and it grows with you. For the right person this is a role you expand into, not a lane you stay in.

Recruitment Process

• An initial call with a member of the Operations team.
• A compensated exercise to test skills relevant to the role(s).
• Final interview with another member of the team.

And that's it!

Not sure you tick every box? Apply anyway if this sounds like how you already work. We are more interested in your operational judgement, reliability, follow-through, and ability to use modern tools well than in a perfect traditional CV.