We talk to a lot of startups, and lately we’ve been noticing a powerful role that’s an unsung hero in fast-growing teams everywhere. We’re calling these people “ops engineers”.
These roles fill critical gaps between operations, technology/product, and customer success, combining elements of operational excellence, engineering, and product ops.
We spoke to employees in these roles from HIVED, SimplyCook, and Pharmacy2U, to understand more about what they contribute and what they think the future looks like for them.
Ops engineers focus on solving operations problems and use technology to make it happen. They’re frequently described as bridging the gap between ops and tech, helping translate operational needs into technical solutions, or adapting available technology to solve operational challenges.
They use low/no code tools, like Airtable and Retool, to prototype solutions rapidly and figure out how to solve problems. And now they’re coming to us at Keel for even more powerful tools at their fingertips.
Last-mile delivery company HIVED has a team known as “ops engineering” who do exactly this:
We’re prototyping solutions as a way of figuring out what we want to do, so we don’t have to invest our tech resource upfront when we are still in a testing phase. We own the full testing journey from ideation to refinement, which allows us to work out the kinks, change things and adapt relatively quickly before handing off the solution for rebuilding.
James Thomson - HIVED
What makes ops engineers unique is their focus on helping to solve operational problems with technical or software solutions. They need to deeply understand the operation and its users to come up with solutions that solve the root of those problems:
I was one of the first employees at HIVED, which means I’ve had the chance to work most of the jobs at HIVED at one point or another. To start, though, I worked as a bike messenger whilst at uni and then joined full-time to work in operations, later becoming an ops manager.
James Thomson, HIVED
I was fortunate that I’d studied pharmacy and had a really good background understanding of everything. It’s possible to come in and learn everything, but you need to be willing to essentially become an expert in the field.
Jas Bansal, Pharmacy2U
I started in customer happiness but we needed someone who could help with communication with tech. I know enough about the business that I can look at technical decisions and spot where it’s going to negatively impact customers.
Natalie Harcourt, SimplyCook
Crucially they’re focused on reaching a practical solution quickly, rather than developing the most elegant or “perfect” one. Ops engineers typically find problems themselves, and are the catalysts for making sure these problems get solved.
You might be an ops engineer if: