Digital Operations & Automation Lead (hands-on) — Telecom Platform Startup, Remote

The role You will design, build and run the internal operating system of the company: the CRM, the supplier and pricing database, the quoting and RFP workflow, order and provisioning hand-offs, the service desk, billing integration, the partner portal back-office, and the automation layer that connects them. Today most of this does not exist yet — you will build it from a blank page using proven components, then keep it running and improving as we scale. This is not a traditional IT or software-engineering role. It is a systems, integration, workflow and data role for someone who understands how a commercial business runs end to end (lead → opportunity → quote → order → delivery → service → invoice → renewal) and who can make that lifecycle flow through connected tools with as few manual touches as possible. What you will do (personally, hands-on) Select, configure and administer our tool stack: CRM (HubSpot/Zoho/Odoo class), service desk, low-code internal apps, network inventory, dashboards, documentation, identity/SSO. Design and own the company data model: partner, customer, site, supplier, product, rate card, quote, order, circuit, device, ticket — with stable identifiers shared across systems. Build our supplier & cost-book system on PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for coverage mapping) and a low-code front-end (Appsmith / Budibase / NocoDB or similar): suppliers, city-by-city coverage, product catalogues, price matrices with full price history, lead times, contracts. Build the RFP-floating workflow: match sites to suppliers by coverage, dispatch structured RFQs, capture and normalise responses (LLM-assisted parsing with human confirmation), compare, assemble partner quotes with margin and approval rules. Build the quote-to-cash automation in n8n (or equivalent): CRM ↔ cost book ↔ orchestrator API ↔ service desk ↔ billing, using REST APIs, webhooks and small Python/TypeScript services where needed. Integrate our SD-WAN orchestration platform's API into the order workflow (tenant creation, device ordering, zero-touch provisioning status). Deliver the weekly operating dashboards (Metabase or similar) for pipeline, partners, quotes, orders, incidents, supplier performance and revenue. Apply practical AI automation to back-office work: rate-card document extraction, email parsing, ticket triage, knowledge-base upkeep. Write the documentation: systems map, runbooks, process flows — so any new hire understands how the company works within a day. First 90 days Month 1: systems map and data model published; CRM live with partner-of-record controls; service desk live. Month 2: supplier & cost-book v1 loaded for our anchor markets; RFQ dispatch and capture working; CRM integrated. Month 3: first partner quote produced end-to-end by the system; portal v0 (onboarding, deal registration, training, tickets) assembled from the stack; first operating dashboard in weekly use. Requirements 5+ years in business systems, integration engineering, revenue operations or platform operations — ideally at a telecom, MSP, SaaS or marketplace company. Hands-on with a workflow automation platform (n8n, Make, Zapier, Airflow, Temporal) and comfortable coding (Python or TypeScript) when the platform is not enough. Strong relational-data skills: PostgreSQL schema design, SQL for reporting. PostGIS or geodata experience is a plus. Experience administering a CRM and a service desk, and building internal tools on a low-code platform. API fluency: REST, OAuth, webhooks, rate limits, idempotency, error handling. You can read vendor API docs and build against them unaided. Practical experience using LLM APIs for document extraction or back-office automation. Process-minded and documentation-disciplined. You default to structured data over spreadsheets and email. Comfortable being an individual contributor for an extended period: you build, you operate, you own the outcome.