Director of Operations & Systems
Bridging the gap between founder vision and daily execution · Scaling operations with the right mix of process, team, and technology.
Core Specialisms:
Tech-Enabled Operations · Automation & AI Tooling · Customer Support Infrastructure · Team Structure & Capacity Building
I build the systems and tools a business needs.
Operations, technology, customer support — sometimes that's AI, sometimes it's a better process, sometimes it's leaving a person in charge.
Operational Health & Workflows
Process mapping, system audits, and standard operating procedures to eliminate bottlenecks and build team capacity.
Right-Sized Tech & Automation
CRM migrations, custom workflow automation, and practical AI assistants that save hours of manual administrative work.
Customer Support Infrastructure
Unified support stacks, escalation paths, and the performance dashboards needed to maintain service levels as volume scales.
Experience
20 years across software engineering, customer solutions, and operational leadership — technical foundations first, then a decade-plus building and scaling organizations from the inside out.
Location
📍 Truckee, CA
Cambridge → London → Palo Alto → Sierra Nevada
Education
Open to
Director of Operations, Director of Customer Experience, and Head of Customer Experience roles — fully remote preferred, with a slight lean toward health tech, ed tech, and early-stage companies.
Functional Nutrition Alliance → Empowered Education → ISSA
2016 – 2026 · 9 years · Remote
Health, nutrition, fitness & wellness education — 2 acquisitions, $2.5M → $12M+
Senior Director, Operations & Customer Support
"Built the operations foundation. Navigated the team through two acquisitions. Led through all of it."
Head of Operations & Support
Functional Nutrition Alliance (2016–2020)
Senior Director, Support, Services & Technology
Empowered Education (2020–2021)
Senior Director, Business Systems
Empowered Education (2021–2022 (incl. parental leave Sep–Dec 2022))
Senior Director, Operations & Customer Support
ISSA (Jan 2023–2026)
- Grew with the organization from $2.5M to $12M in revenue as Head of Operations, scaling from a single cohort to 6+ concurrent programs
- Led a distributed team of 20+ across Support, Operations, IT, and Platform Services — maintaining 90%+ SLA delivery through rapid growth and acquisition
- Partnered with the founder on annual strategic planning and roadmap development, translating organizational vision into scalable, mission-driven operations in a high-growth environment
- Directed CRM migration from Keap to HubSpot and implemented a new payment/order management system modernizing core revenue infrastructure
- Implemented PartnerStack (affiliate management) and Zoom Events (marketing events) with full HubSpot integration and data analytics
- Built operational dashboards and reporting behind portfolio-level business reviews
- Transitioned the business systems team to Agile: backlog management, sprint cadence, balance between ongoing support and new feature delivery
- Served on the senior leadership team, coordinating cross-functionally across ISSA's portfolio to manage business reviews and align strategy and process
MSc Human Nutrition & Functional Medicine
University of Western States · 2014–2016
DisplayLink Corporation · Adder Technology
2005 – 2014 · UK and US
Software engineering, customer solutions engineering & technical account management
Roles: Software Development Engineer · Field Applications Engineer · Technical Account Manager
"Where the technical foundation was built — software, solutions engineering, and deep customer partnership at scale."
- Software development and field applications engineering across UK, Asia, and the United States — shipping USB Graphics and AV/IP-KVM products for global OEM partners
- Customer solutions engineering: primary technical liaison for HP, Dell, and Lenovo, translating complex hardware/software requirements into workable solutions across product lines
- Technical account management for enterprise clients including Warner Brothers and Lucasfilm, supporting broadcast, post-production, command and control, and data center deployments
- Supported global product launches across multiple verticals — building the cross-functional, customer-first working style that still defines how I operate today
- The decade in engineering is where I learned how Product, Engineering, and Customers actually fit together — experience I bring directly to every operational role since
Projects
Fun personal projects that keep technical skills current — building real things that solve real problems.
Second Brain
Personal AI memory system
A personal AI “second brain” designed to know the commitments, context, and everyday details that create a busy family’s mental load. Built as both a hands-on architecture project and a useful daily tool: selected Google Drive content flows into a Postgres and vector-memory system, while source-cited Q&A distinguishes structured facts from unstructured knowledge. Commitment tracking and a daily briefing are next on the roadmap.
Recipe Collector & Meal Planner
AI-powered household planning app
A shared household app that uses AI to import and organize recipes from websites, text, or files. It turns a scattered recipe collection into weekly plans, pantry-based recipe matches, kid-friendly safety labels, and automatically generated shopping lists — making the everyday work of feeding a family more coordinated and manageable.
AI Job Search Agent
Personal automation pipeline
An AI agent that runs my entire job search. A scheduled Make workflow scans my Gmail, scrapes 20+ job boards and Greenhouse ATS pages every morning, scores each role against my profile with the Claude API, and logs everything to Airtable. I wake up to a curated digest of ranked matches in my inbox, plus a dashboard (deployed on Vercel) to track applications. 839 jobs tracked so far, ranked by fit score, surfacing VP / Director / Senior Director roles with an explanation for each — saving 1–2 hours of manual searching every day. What it demonstrates: AI-driven workflow automation, multi-source data aggregation, and scoring/ranking system design applied to a real operational problem.
End-to-End Coaching Customer Support & Operations Stack
Sian Crespo Coaching
A learning and demo project. Architected a complete coaching business operations stack from scratch: Stripe checkout → Make automation → Airtable athlete database → Notion plan delivery. AI email support layer built on Claude API: classifies incoming tickets by category, priority, and sentiment; high-confidence queries auto-respond; low-confidence or negative-sentiment queries escalate to human review. Airtable Interface dashboard tracks ticket volume, AI deflection rate, escalation rate, and CSAT. What it demonstrates: end-to-end systems thinking, AI integration for operations automation, and the same workflow design principles I apply at Director level.
Endurance Athlete Lactate Testing Platform
Endurance coaching platform
Converted a VBA/Excel lactate testing system into a web application for endurance coaches. Athlete management, interactive lactate curve charts, and PDF export for athlete reports. Built on Supabase and deployed on Vercel. The interesting part: the original tool was a complex Excel model encoding real sports science (lactate threshold methodology). Rebuilding it as a web app required understanding both the domain and the architecture. Built with Claude as a development partner.
EV Comparison — Truckee Family Guide
Personal data analysis tool
Built a detailed EV decision guide for a specific real problem: replacing a Land Rover Discovery for a family in Truckee, CA — with an 882-mile Steamboat Springs road trip as the stress test. Covers 4 vehicles across charging specs, real-world range in summer heat and winter cold, stop-by-stop route analysis for both July and February, configured pricing from actual dealer PDFs, and a final weighted verdict. What it demonstrates: structured analytical thinking, multi-variable systems design, and the ability to synthesize complex decisions into a clear recommendation — the same skills I apply to operations infrastructure choices.
Chilli's Adventure Journal
An AI-powered trail log for a Sierra Nevada husky
678 adventures. 1,652 miles on record. Every single one narrated by the dog. Built a Strava-integrated journal that auto-generates first-person adventure entries for my husky Chilli — complete with mood ratings (EPIC / EXCELLENT / SOLID / SUSPICIOUS / CHAOTIC), weather data, route stats, and tactical squirrel threat assessments. Demonstrates: Strava API integration, AI-driven content generation, data aggregation and display, and product thinking. Also just very fun.
Beyond Work
Non-profit work
Co-founded Bike Like a Girl — a 501(c)(3) getting girls and women on bikes in the Reno-Tahoe region, whose team broke the Race Across America women's record in 2015.
Runs camps, clinics, rides, and equipment programs to make cycling accessible and empowering — with a focus on closing the gender gap in participation from an early age.
Also served as Director of Operations for Ride On TNT, leading execution, project management, and the organization's operational foundation.
Endurance athlete
Competitive off-road endurance athlete across mountain biking and triathlon — which directly informed the coaching platform project.
- ·Multi-time finisher, Leadville Trail 100 MTB
- ·Multi-time age group national champion, Xterra Triathlon
- ·Multi-time competitor, Xterra Triathlon World Championships
Currently: trail running with Chilli the husky, mountain biking and gravel riding with my husband, and getting our daughter into trail adventures via Kids Ride Shotgun.
Training log
Follow my training on StravaRides, runs & racesA bit about me
I grew up in the UK, studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then spent nearly a decade in software engineering, customer solutions engineering, and technical account management — building the kind of technical fluency that I still use every day, just in very different contexts now. I moved to California in 2008, transitioned into operations and customer experience leadership, and spent the next decade-plus running increasingly complex functions for mission-driven, high-growth organizations.
I live in Truckee, CA, with my husband, our daughter (she's 3), and our husky Chilli. When I'm not building operations systems or debugging side projects, we're out in the Sierra Nevada — trail running, snowboarding in winter, swimming in the lakes in summer. Endurance sport has always been part of the picture too, which is probably why so many of my projects end up being about health, nutrition, fitness, and wellness.
What I find genuinely interesting is the space where operations, technology, and people meet — building systems that actually work for the humans using them, not just on paper. The engineering background means I can sit with Product and Engineering without translation. The operations experience means I know which metrics actually matter. The personal projects are how I keep learning.
Currently thinking about
Keeping up with what's actually useful vs. what's hype — and building small things to find out.
Figuring out which races deserve a slot this year — and whether Chilli qualifies as a pacer.
Which Sierra Nevada trails are Chilli-approved: must have adequate squirrel density and lake access.
Still deciding. Built the spreadsheet. Made the comparison site. Somehow still undecided.
What I'm reading
Let's talk
Background spanning software engineering, health, nutrition, fitness, and wellness — which tends to make for interesting conversations.