Lead Operations Analyst, AI & Automation

Location: Dallas preferred, close to where our inventory and operations run

Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside

Department: Operations

Reports to: Director of Operations

Also posted as: Senior Operations Analyst · Business Intelligence Analyst · Automation Lead · Data Analyst

About Rare Candy

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one. We're a 10-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team.

The Role

Running an operation -- the models, the dashboards, the inventory math, the recurring processes -- used to take an army of analysts. With AI, it takes one exceptional thinker to wield it.

We're hiring a Lead Operations Analyst to own the analytical and automation backbone of our operation. You'll run the daily and weekly inventory processes, own the dashboards our decisions depend on, and build the workflows and automations that take manual work off the whole team's plate. Your home base is operations and inventory, but the leverage you create will benefit the whole company, growth included.

You own the dashboards, the recurring workflows, and the automation buildout. Operations leadership owns the final inventory policy and the business tradeoffs.

Here's the specific kind of person we're looking for: someone who has the expertise to do the work by hand, but has figured out how to get massive leverage by building custom skills, workflows, and plugins that leverage AI tools and other modern tools to do the heavy lifting, and has the judgment to check it, catch what's wrong, and ship something they'd stake their name on. You know the fundamentals cold, which is exactly why you can trust yourself to move fast with AI and still get the numbers right. In a business where inventory accuracy is everything, that combination is the whole job.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days: You take over running our daily and weekly inventory processes, so they no longer depend on the founder or ops leadership to keep moving. You also identify and ship at least one workflow or automation that unlocks real, measurable value.

First few months: You own the operations dashboards end to end, so the team makes decisions off reliable, self-serve data you maintain, and you've built a growing library of automations that remove manual hours across the operation.

By the end of year one, the analytical and automation engine of operations runs on you, not on the founder. Ops decisions are backed by data nobody has to scramble to assemble. You've shipped a real portfolio of time-saving automations across ops and growth, and you've become the person who figures out how we put each new wave of AI tooling to work.

What You'll Do

• Run the recurring engine: own the daily and weekly inventory processes end to end, reliably, without dropping balls.

• Own the dashboards: build and maintain the operational dashboards and data the team trusts to make decisions. Get the numbers right every time.

• Build leverage: identify high-value bottlenecks and ship no-code or low-code workflows and automations that eliminate manual work across operations and growth.

• Orchestrate AI and verify it: use AI to do operational work at a fraction of the old cost, and bring the craft and rigor to check its output and catch what's wrong.

• Operationalize what's next: stay on the frontier of AI tooling and own how we put each new capability to work in our operation.

• Create leverage across the company: based primarily in operations, you'll also build tools and automations that help our growth team move faster.

A Day in Your Life at Rare Candy

You start by running the morning inventory process, except 'running' now means kicking off a workflow you built, scanning the output for anything that looks off, and catching the one number that doesn't reconcile before anyone downstream sees it.

Midday, you spot that the team is hand-assembling a report every week, so you spend two hours building the automation that kills that task forever.

After lunch, you refine a dashboard the ops team relies on, then test a new AI tool against a gnarly sourcing question, getting to an answer in twenty minutes that used to take an afternoon, and double-checking it against the fundamentals before you trust it.

You Might Be a Fit If

• You've got 3 to 6 years turning messy operational reality into reliable numbers and working systems. We care far more about what you've actually built and run than your exact years.

• You have genuine analytical craft. You're fluent in Excel or Sheets, you can do the analysis from first principles, and that's exactly why you can trust yourself to move fast with AI. SQL is a plus, not a requirement.

• You’re on the bleeding edge of new AI-enabled tools and workflows. You default to having AI do the heavy lifting, and you have the judgment to verify its output, catch errors, and never ship a number you haven't checked.

• You build. You ship no-code and low-code automations and workflows (Airtable, Zapier or Make, scripts, dashboards, whatever gets it done) that measurably save people time.

• You're relentlessly detail-oriented. In a business where inventory accuracy is the whole game, you're the person who catches the thing everyone else missed.

• You're scrappy and high-agency. You figure it out, build the workaround, and don't wait to be handed a process or a tool.

• Required signal: you know the trading-card or collector world. You collect, you play, or you've got real fluency in an adjacent collectible community.

What You'll Need to Thrive Here

This is a build-it role in a live operation, so you'll be maintaining and upgrading the engine simultaneously. Some days are heads-down dashboard and automation work; others are firefighting a number that has to be right before the team acts on it.

You'll have a lot of autonomy over how you build, while final inventory policy and the business calls stay with ops leadership.

If you love removing manual work, you trust your own verification, and you want to own how a fast-scaling operation uses AI, this is a great fit.

Why Join Us Now

• Own the analytical and automation backbone of a fast-scaling operation, with real scope from day one.

• Work at the frontier: this role is built on the bet that AI changes what one great operator can do. You'll get to prove it, every day.

• Build the systems the whole company runs on, and grow with a fast-scaling operation.

• Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside.

• Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend.

• A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby.

How to Apply

Apply through our Ashby posting and answer these:

1. Describe a messy operations or reporting problem you turned into a reliable process, dashboard, or automation. What was broken, what did you build, and what improved?

2. What tools have you used to build operational systems? Include Excel or Sheets, Airtable, automation tools, scripts, dashboards, AI tools, or anything else relevant.

3. Give one example of using AI to move faster. How did you verify the output before trusting it?

4. Tell us about a time you caught a data, inventory, or process error before it caused damage.

5. Required: what trading-card or collector communities do you understand best? Tell us your favorite card, set, format, or collector niche.

Rare Candy is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate individuality, from Pikachu collectors to Planeswalker pros, and are committed to building an inclusive team.