Last edited: November 7th 2022

This guide was written by the Pineapple Operations team with inputs from several operations staff at various organizations to provide an overview of considerations for entering operations work at EA orgs. We think it'll be especially useful for people new to EA and/or operations who are considering working in this space. We think it could also be valuable for people looking to hire for these roles to understand the perspectives of candidates but it has less directly relevant advice (we may write up something in the future).

We've chosen to publish this now because it seems like it could be useful to many people. We may make updates in the future and will keep a change log in the appendix.

People doing operations building a lightbulb, by DALL-E

1. What is operations in EA?

TL;DR it’s come to mean “everything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work” (this is not normally what operations means outside of EA, administration may be a more appropriate term).

Operations in EA is a very broad area that can mean a lot of different things. This guide focuses on most operations roles (excluding PA/ExA roles and operations leadership roles). There are a few roles that we’ve seen open positions for in the last year (2022). Note that many roles will include several items from this list:

Operations Manager (most often at small / new organisations)
- Implementing and maintaining general systems & processes
- Managing Accounting, Payroll & Legal
- Fundraising
- Marketing & Communications
- PA tasks for the team
- Other ad-hoc projects
Office & Community Manager
People Ops/HR
Recruiting Coordinator
Special Projects Associate / Project Manager (usually helping incubate new projects or do project management)
Events Associate (events planning & execution)
Logistics/Supply Chain

Some roles will also have operations staff doing direct generalist work - such as research or program development - as needed, and generalist roles at smaller orgs will also involve operations work. Generalists can do many different things, well outside the ops domain - could be research, sales, and even having inputs on strategy. Generalist work that involves research will be often very different in nature to operations where task switching is common, or external facing work vs back-office admin tasks which don’t req...

Operations in EA FAQs