Senior Business Operations Manager

About the role:

The Sr. Business Operations Manager is a strategic partner to the leadership of Samsara’s Global Support organization, driving operational excellence and enabling data-informed decision-making at scale. This role sits at the intersection of strategy and execution, supporting senior leadership with the insights, communications, and operational frameworks needed to run and grow the business effectively.

This role owns the annual operating plan and the operating cadence that measures performance against it. On the planning side, you will own the capacity, headcount, and cost model that connects support volume, productivity, AI deflection, and staffing assumptions into a defensible operating plan — and act as the connective tissue between Support leadership, Workforce Management, and Finance. On the business operations side, you will own the reporting and business review cadence for Customer Support, turning a wide set of operational metrics into a clear narrative about what is happening, why, and what leadership should do about it.

This is a high-autonomy role for a builder. You will take ambiguous, loosely scoped problems: a cost target, a capacity gap, an unexplained trend, and return with structured analysis, a defensible model, and a recommendation leaders can act on. You will operate credibly with senior stakeholders across Support, Finance, and People, influence without direct authority, and use modern AI tools every day to work at a level of speed and rigor that would not otherwise be possible. Success in this role looks like leaders making better decisions faster, with a plan and a set of numbers everyone trusts.

In this role, you will:

• Own the annual operating plan (AOP) for the Support organization end to end: building and maintaining the capacity, headcount, and cost model that translates volume forecasts, productivity, AI deflection, and staffing assumptions into a defensible operating plan and budget.
• Model and pressure-test the strategic levers available to the business: headcount and vendor/BPO mix, cost to serve, deflection and automation impact, service level and coverage tradeoffs — and bring leadership clear recommendations with quantified impact and stated assumptions.
• Own the Customer Support business review cadence (monthly and quarterly reviews) end to end: metric definition and data validation, executive narrative and insight, and follow-through on the decisions and actions that come out of it.
• Build and maintain the reporting frameworks and metric definitions leaders run the business on — productivity, cost to serve, CSAT, time to resolution, deflection — and make them self-serve so managers can answer their own questions.
• Partner with Support leaders on the operating programs that turn plan into behavior, including productivity and incentive program design, capacity allocation, and operational improvement initiatives that measurably improve efficiency and customer experience.
• Leverage AI tools (e.g., Claude) and self-service data capabilities on a day-to-day basis to accelerate modeling, analysis, narrative generation, and reporting — and raise the bar for how the broader operations team applies them.
• Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles (Focus on Customer Success, Build for the Long Term, Adopt a Growth Mindset, Be Inclusive, Win as a Team) as we scale globally and across new offices.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• 10+ years of experience in business operations, strategic finance/FP&A, management consulting, strategy, or a related field.
• Bachelor’s degree from a 4-year accredited university.
• Experience owning an annual operating plan, capacity plan, or equivalent multi-quarter planning process for a large organization or function.
• Demonstrated experience building and owning complex operating or financial models (headcount, capacity, and cost) that senior leaders make decisions from.
• Experience owning a recurring executive business review cadence (e.g., MBR/QBR) end to end, including metric definitions, narrative, and follow-through.
• Demonstrated ability to build executive-level presentations and strategic communications that convey a clear, compelling narrative.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to independently source, interpret, and synthesize large and imperfect datasets to support decision-making, including familiarity with data tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker, SQL, Databricks) for self-serve analytics.
• Comfort and previous experience using AI tools for analysis, modeling, content generation, and workflow automation.
• Experience working cross-functionally and influencing senior stakeholders without direct authority.
• High degree of independence and intellectual curiosity: able to take a loosely defined problem and return with structured, rigorous thinking and actionable recommendations.