Commercial Operations Associate
Operations
New York, NY, USA
About Empathy
Empathy is transforming the way families navigate life’s most difficult times - from the loss of a loved one to other major life transitions. By combining technology with compassionate human care, we bring clarity, comfort, and peace of mind when it matters most.
We partner with leading employers, insurers, and financial institutions to deliver meaningful, human-centric support at scale. Today, Empathy supports over 50 million people across the US, Canada, and the UK.
Backed by top-tier investors including General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Adams Street, Aleph and Entreé Capital. We've raised over $160 million to date, including a $72 million Series C, to expand our impact and scale our mission worldwide.
The Commercial Operations team is the connective tissue behind Empathy's commercial growth.
In this role you will
You will own our business value agenda — building the systems that demonstrate Empathy's impact, running experiments that surface new value levers, and making ROI a core part of how every function operates.
You're someone who gets energized by complex challenges, loves breaking them into their component parts, and drives them to a result. A self-starter who wants to own something meaningful from day one — with the IQ and EQ to rally cross-functional teams around a central goal, and the influence to keep people motivated, accountable, and organized without relying on authority.
You're practical and creative, comfortable in ambiguity, and stay a few steps ahead to proactively clear the path. A fast and eager learner who won't hesitate to go beyond their role to fill gaps — all in focused pursuit of the shared business outcome.
Your two main focus areas:
1. Own how Empathy proves its value
You're the engine behind how Empathy proves its value. You take the priorities set with leadership and make them real: building the frameworks, running the analysis, and keeping the work moving across teams.
In practice, you will:
- Own the business value roadmap day to day. Track the metrics that matter, keep priorities straight, and drive the highest-impact opportunities through to execution.
- Bring the field into the work. Partner with Sales and Client Success to learn what resonates with prospects and clients, what stakeholders care about, and what drives renewals, then feed that back to sharpen Empathy's value narrative.
- Partner with Product to experiment. Help design and run tests on what they're building, so the features that move the needle for clients are the ones that ship.
- Keep the cross-functional work joined up. Coordinate the forums and workshops across Sales, Product Marketing, Product and Client Success, hold alignment, and stay the central point of contact for ideas, escalations, and progress.
- Build the infrastructure that makes value repeatable. Develop the frameworks, establish best practices, and partner with teams on the ROI assets that raise the bar across the org.
2. Plug into the priorities that matter
You work alongside the COO and Principal of Commercial Operations across the priorities that move the business. Some of it is planned. Much of it lands without warning. You pick it up and run.
In practice, you will:
- Drive the priorities that matter. Plug in across commercial ops, from company strategy and product launches to support strategies and the ad hoc problems that surface week to week.
- Own how the team sets goals and tracks them. Help shape the goals that commercial ops works to, build the reporting that shows where things stand, and keep leadership clear on progress against plan.
- Champion an experimentation mindset across Empathy. Proactively identify opportunities to unlock value and efficiency, validate quickly using the data available and a creative approach, and help the rest of the team build the muscle to move this way.
- Bring the team together. Coordinate the hackathons, social impact work, and cross-functional moments that keep culture and connection strong.
- Supercharge AI adoption. Spread quick wins and best practice, scale what's been built across divisions, and sharpen day-to-day efficiency.
Requirements
- 3–5 years of professional experience, with time spent in consulting, strategy, operations, or a similarly structured, fast-paced environment
- A natural project and stakeholder manager: able to take a complex, ambiguous challenge, break it into parts, and drive it to a result across multiple functions — without being told what the parts are
- A self-starter with an entrepreneurial mindset: proactive by nature, energized by white space, and more at home building something from scratch than following a playbook
- Genuine excitement about experimentation: you know how to design a test, draw defensible conclusions, and move fast even with imperfect data
- Strong communicator and presenter: you can make complex frameworks land with senior stakeholders and translate them into action
- A do-er as much as a thinker: you set the strategy and then you execute it
Preferred qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree
- Background in management consulting and/or early-stage SaaS startup environment
- Experience working with product and tech teams, product marketing, or commercial strategy
- Experience building or operating a cross-functional program or COE from scratch
- Comfort with AI, data and analytics tools; experience building measurement frameworks
The salary for this position approximately ranges between $100,000-$130,000 base salary with variable compensation based on goal attainment, plus equity and full benefits package. The exact compensation is decided based on many factors, including but not limited to: skills, qualifications, and geographic location.
To support our employees, we offer comprehensive benefits both in and out of the office. These include premium healthcare with options for $0 deductibles, comprehensive paid time off, and flexible parental leave. Our bereavement care includes premium access to the Empathy platform and support for employees and their families. We support financial wellness with a company-sponsored 401(k) plan and up to a 4% employer match, along with competitive stock options. With annual retreats, team lunches for our NYC office, and a remote employee stipend, we prioritize spending time together and investing in our people. We hope you will want to join our exceptional team!