Want to know if this job is worth applying to?
New York, New York, United States
Onsite
Tenex Labs is an applied AI consulting firm that embeds engineering pods inside enterprise clients to build production AI systems, and we are growing quickly enough that the back office supporting that growth (access, vendors, compliance evidence, onboarding, offboarding, and the office itself) is still being assembled, largely by people carrying it alongside their actual jobs.
The Operations Coordinator takes that surface area over and turns it into real infrastructure, owning the systems that determine who has access to what, which vendors we are permitted to use, whether the office functions day to day, and whether we pass our audits, while sitting at the center of hiring, HR, IT, and Finance to connect everything that has to happen when someone joins, changes roles, or leaves.
Most entry-level operations jobs hand you a single piece of a process that somebody else designed, whereas this one hands you the processes themselves, several of which do not exist yet and will be built by whoever takes the role.
The position reports to the Director of Operations and works across nearly every function in the company.
These areas are yours to both decide and execute.
IT access and provisioning
Intake, triage, and fulfillment of all IT access requests through our Notion-based IT Service Center
New hire access provisioning across Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, and role-specific tooling, complete before day one
Same-day deprovisioning at departure, triggered by the departure notice, with completion evidence captured for audit
Laptop, monitor, and peripheral procurement, imaging, shipping, and asset tracking
AI usage requests
Review and approval of requests to use AI tools, models, and agents against our internal AI usage policy
Maintenance of the approved-tools list and the enterprise account and SSO posture behind it, since enforced SSO is what makes clean deprovisioning possible
Escalation of high-risk use cases
Vendor review and approval (new)
Collection and evaluation of security documentation, SOC 2 reports, subprocessor lists, and data handling terms from external vendors
Routing of contracts, DPAs, and BAAs to the appropriate approver
Maintenance of the vendor inventory, including periodic re-reviews on schedule
Compliance program administration
End-to-end ownership of our GRC relationship
Management of our ISO 42001, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 Type II workstreams, covering evidence collection, control monitoring, remediation tracking, and auditor requests
Upkeep of Vanta, ensuring necessary actions are reviewed and acknowledged
Day-to-day point of contact for our external compliance partner and auditors
Office management
The office request queue, covering badges and building access, maintenance issues, desk and equipment setup, furniture and space needs, and AV problems
Stocking of snacks, beverages, water service, coffee, and general supplies, with reordering on a set cadence rather than in reaction to running out
Point of contact for building management and facilities vendors, including maintenance tickets worked through to resolution
Issuance, tracking, and deactivation of building badges, keeping badge access aligned with the same joiner, mover, and leaver events that drive system access
Upkeep of conference rooms and shared spaces, including AV setup and the room booking platform
The work above keeps the current operation running, while the following is the part that compounds, since each of these either does not exist yet or exists only in a form that will not survive the next fifty hires.
A vendor review and approval process from scratch, covering intake, security review, approval routing, and periodic re-review
An asset inventory that tracks every laptop, monitor, and badge from issue through return
An onboarding and offboarding system that works identically for our 70th hire and our 150th
An evidence collection cadence that turns audits into a routine rather than a fire drill
Ownership of the onboarding and offboarding checklist, ensuring new joiners are set up with the proper system access
Coordination of orientation sessions and the logistics behind them for new hires
Collection of I-9 documentation, adherence to compliance deadlines, and accurate entry of new hires into our HRIS
Internal liaison to outside immigration counsel, gathering documentation, tracking filing deadlines, and keeping candidates and employees informed
Initiation, monitoring, and closeout of background checks, with adverse findings escalated rather than adjudicated
Confirmation that departure notices arrive and that the deprovisioning workflow starts the same day
Zero to two years of experience, with recent graduates encouraged to apply
Demonstrated ownership of something from start to finish, whether that was an internship, a job, a student organization, or a project of your own
An instinct for organization, meaning you keep a list, work the list, and do not need reminding
Precision that holds up under volume, since access and compliance work punishes sloppiness in ways most work does not
Comfort learning unfamiliar software quickly, since you will administer tools you have never seen before
Willingness to move between an auditor request and a broken conference room in the same hour, and to treat both as the job
Clear written communication, particularly when chasing people who owe you something
Discretion with employee, candidate, and client information
Exposure to a formal compliance program (SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, or similar), whether as an owner or a contributor
Familiarity with identity and access concepts such as SSO, MFA, role-based access, and least privilege
Hands-on experience with Vanta, ADP, Notion, Google Workspace admin, Slack admin, or an ATS
Experience managing an office through a move, an expansion, or a build-out
Experience coordinating with outside immigration counsel
Familiarity with enterprise AI tooling and the governance questions it raises
Tenex is scaling toward roughly 150 people while running client work that carries real security and privacy obligations, which makes access hygiene, vendor diligence, and audit readiness closer to a precondition for selling to enterprise clients than to administrative overhead, and it makes this role the reason those things stay true as we grow and the reason the office keeps working while they do.
The position is also an unusually fast education, because within a year you will have built and run systems that most people do not touch until far later in a career and will have developed a working understanding of how a company actually operates from the inside, which is difficult to come by this early anywhere else.
