Operations & Executive Coordinator

What you'll own

As a vital member of MBDF’s operations team, who will report our Business Operations Lead, you will own:

Operations Coordination

A wide range of operational processes and tasks, including (representative, not exhaustive): 

• Task and project management: create, update, and track tasks in Asana. Ensure deadlines are visible, followed up on, and nothing falls through the cracks. Develop and maintain tracking tools like Kanban Boards and Dashboards to ensure team visibility on critical tasks and milestones. 

• Data hygiene and management: Update and maintain Airtable/CRM databases. Build interfaces, reporting tools, and other visualizations to enable team visibility and decision-making on key goals.  

• Recruitment support: Facilitating candidate reviews, interview scheduling, and decision meetings/debriefs.

• Event support: Oversee event attendee comms calendar and registration processes; support event logistics research and coordination, as needed.  

• Process improvement: identify recurring friction points in ops workflows and propose/implement fixes. Build SOPs and templates that make the team more efficient.

• Internal tool Management: Ensure MBDF's productivity tools (e.g., Slack, Gmail, Drive) are working effectively for the team by managing Slack channel hygiene, maintaining Drive structures, updating knowledge bases, and facilitating new team member tech onboarding. 

• Ad hoc execution: research tasks, procurement, and any hands-on work that senior staff need off their plates

Executive & Admin Support 

In addition to your operations responsibilities, you will serve as the primary admin partner to MBDF's Director and leadership team, owning the following tasks:

• Calendar management: Own scheduling, rescheduling, protecting focus time, managing scheduling complexity across a distributed international team.

• Correspondence support: Coordinate high stakes correspondence across the team by managing drafting and approval workflows and ensuring prompt responses to critical stakeholders. 

• Travel coordination:  Support executive travel, including managing visas, logistics, and hotel and flight bookings.

• Meeting preparation and logistics: Assemble agendas, briefing documents, talking points, and pre-reads, coordinating with other members of the team to ensure meeting time is maximized. Track follow-up actions post-meeting and ensure they’re completed. 

• Document management: Ensure documents are organized, shared, and versioned in Google Drive per MBDF norms. 

• Expense management: Track and submit expenses.

About You

Must-Haves

• 4–7 years of professional experience in operations, administration, executive support, project coordination, or a similar execution-heavy role. 

• Demonstrated ability to support senior leaders: you know how to manage an executive’s calendar, triage their inbox, anticipate their needs, and protect their time 

• Excellent written communication in English — you’ll be drafting emails and documents on behalf of the leadership team and communicating with senior external stakeholders on logistics.

• Ability to manage competing priorities across multiple stakeholders without escalating every conflict. You use good judgment to triage, and you communicate proactively when something can’t get done on time

• Process-oriented mindset: When you complete tasks, you think carefully about how to do them better next time.You build templates, SOPs, and systems that make things repeatable

• Discretion and trustworthiness: you’ll have access to sensitive strategy documents, board communications, funder relationships, and confidential personnel information

• Genuine enthusiasm for hands-on, execution-heavy work. This role involves a lot of grunt work:formatting documents, chasing follow-ups, booking travel, updating trackers. 

• Comfort working remotely in a fast-paced, internationally distributed team across multiple time zones.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Asana and Airtable or similar project management, database, and CRM tools

• Experience in a remote-first, Slack-heavy organization

• International travel logistics experience (visa applications, complex multi-city itineraries, security-sensitive travel)

• Event coordination experience (logistics, not content)

• Impact motivated, previous demonstrated interest in biosecurity or science policy. We’re especially excited about people who see this as their entry point into high-impact work.

• Experience in a nonprofit, think tank, or mission-driven startup environment

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at MBDF. Practically, that means an MBDF staff member reviews every application carefully, considering the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Practicalities

• Compensation: $75,000–$100,000 + full benefits; exact offer will reflect experience and fit.

• Location: Remote, within the United States, based in EST Timezone,.  

• Working hours: Must be available during core hours (10am-2pm ET) for overlap with team members across time zones.

• Deadline to Apply: Round 1 Application Deadline — May 6 

• Start: As soon as practical — applications reviewed on a rolling basis.

• Reports to: Business Operations Lead

MBDF is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.