Operations & Finance Specialist
Participatory Budgeting Project
Accounting & Finance, Operations
Remote
Posted on Mar 13, 2026
The Operations & Finance Specialist supports the implementation, coordination, and continuous improvement of PBP’s operational and financial infrastructure. This role ensures that staff have the systems, processes, and guidance needed to operate efficiently, compliantly, and in alignment with organizational and funder requirements.
Reporting to the Director of Finance, this position serves as a key connector between operations, finance, programs, and systems—strengthening financial controls, supporting grant and contract compliance, and improving organizational effectiveness through strong project management and process design.
- Application Deadline
- April 06, 2026
- Department
- Management
- Employment Type
- Full Time
- Location
- Remote
- Workplace type
- Fully remote
- Compensation
- $70,000 / year
- Reporting To
- Lavette Dow-Jones, Finance Director
Duties and Responsibilities
Operations
- Maintain and support PBP’s remote work infrastructure, including Google Workspace, Asana, Harvest, Rippling, Zoom, and other organizational platforms.
- Administer requests for supplies and equipment and manage renewals of subscriptions and licenses essential to the organization.
- Support the evaluation, refinement, and implementation of operational and financial systems, including time tracking, expense workflows, contract management, project management tools, and system integrations.
- Lead general IT and equipment tracking and coordination with vendors, as needed.
Financial operations support
- Coordinate accounts payable processes by collecting invoices, verifying approvals and budget alignment, and preparing documentation for entry into financial systems in coordination with the Director of Finance.
- Serve as the primary administrator for time and expense tracking systems (Harvest), ensuring accuracy, compliance, and timely submissions.
- Produce monthly, quarterly, and annual labor allocation and timekeeping reports to support budgeting, capacity planning, and grant compliance.
- Support payroll coordination through Rippling by validating timesheets, stipends, and PTO balances and serving as the first point of contact for payroll-related inquiries (excluding payroll processing and final approval).
Budget, grant, and contract support
- Support invoice submissions to cities, funders, and partners and maintain organized documentation for audit and compliance purposes.
- Maintain contract trackers and support external agreement workflows with partners, vendors, and consultants.
Human Resources Operations –
- Support hiring processes by updating and maintaining applicant tracking systems.
- Coordinate job postings and recruitment logistics in collaboration with hiring committees.
- Coordinate onboarding and offboarding processes, including systems access, documentation, and internal account setup.
- With the Director of Finance, coordinate the annual performance review process and related documentation.
- Support the maintenance and administration of Rippling HR systems, serving as liaison between staff and Rippling support as needed.
Organizational Development & Project Management
- Collaborate with staff and leadership to support annual organizational goals and operational priorities.
- Manage timelines, workflows, and deliverables for cross-functional operational and systems projects using Asana or similar tools.
- Coordinate logistics for internal meetings, retreats, convenings, conferences, and organizational events.
- Maintain and update standard operating procedures (SOPs) related to operations, finance-adjacent workflows, and compliance.
- Participate in organization-wide meetings and learning activities, contributing to continuous improvement and staff capacity building.
Qualifications
- At least three to five years of experience in operations, with demonstrated exposure to financial processes such as general ledger accounting and budgeting support, time tracking, expense reimbursement, payroll coordination, or grant administration.
- Strong technical and systems aptitude; ability to work across platforms and learn new tools quickly.
- Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, including formulas, pivot tables, and data reconciliation.
- Advanced proficiency in Google Suite.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to coordinate effectively with internal teams, external partners, and vendors.
- High attention to detail and ability to manage multiple priorities independently.
- Strong interpersonal skills and comfort working within a collaborative, distributed leadership structure.
- Adaptability and sound judgment in responding to evolving organizational needs.
- Demonstrated accountability, follow-through, and ability to create systems to track work and deadlines.
- Experience managing expectations and communicating progress clearly and transparently.
- Commitment to participatory, accessible, and inclusive operational practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in nonprofit, public-sector, or grant-funded environments.
- Familiarity with financial and operational systems such as Quickbooks, Harvest, Rippling, BILL, Sage Intacct, or similar platforms.
- Experience supporting audits or financial reviews.
- Project management experience supporting operational or systems initiatives.
- Experience working within a sociocratic framework that balances autonomy and shared decision-making
Benefits
Our organizational practices strive to embody our core values of community, equity, learning, participatory democracy, and transparency. We make decisions together, through team-based processes, sociocratic consent, and a commitment to building trust in our team. This means all staff are deeply engaged in the organization’s planning and decision-making.
An ideal candidate will thrive in a collaborative environment, be ready to dream big and turn those dreams into achievable goals with a deeply committed team. Our (virtual) office culture is evolving as we quickly grow, and we invite you to build it with us!
We invest in the professional growth and personal care of our people, including strong benefits:
An ideal candidate will thrive in a collaborative environment, be ready to dream big and turn those dreams into achievable goals with a deeply committed team. Our (virtual) office culture is evolving as we quickly grow, and we invite you to build it with us!
We invest in the professional growth and personal care of our people, including strong benefits:
- Three (3) weeks annual paid vacation, eleven (11) paid holidays, five (5) floating holidays, and two (2) week-long paid summer and end of year org-wide closures
- Full employee coverage for health insurance (including dental and vision), flexible spending account, life insurance; option available for dependents and/or spouses/partners to join at cost
- Retirement plan with up to 2% employer match
- Generous Sick & Wellbeing Leave, Family Leave, and Emergency Sick Leave policies
- Professional development resources as well as work from home resources
- Schedule and work site flexibility to accommodate your life, including families, continuing education, and community leadership.
This position is remote and offers ample flex time to accommodate the need for non-traditional hours. The annual salary for this position is $70,000.
PBP is an Equal Opportunity Employer, strongly committed to building a staff that represents the diversity of communities we work in. We strongly encourage applications from black, indigenous, and people of color, women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
PBP is an Equal Opportunity Employer, strongly committed to building a staff that represents the diversity of communities we work in. We strongly encourage applications from black, indigenous, and people of color, women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
About Participatory Budgeting Project
For 10 years, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) has empowered people to participate in democracy through revolutionary civics in action and seeks to collaboratively transform democracy to center community power. Our work focuses on Participatory Democracy as a practice of collective governance where we all share real decision-making power rather than just a select few. This includes our work to expand Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes that give people real power over the money that affects their lives. Through our work with PB partners in over 30 cities, we have engaged over 534,000 people in deciding how to spend over $337 million. We support partners in establishing and running PD processes in a range of settings (e.g. cities, schools, organizations) across the United States.
PBP is a newly remote first organization and is at an exciting moment of transition, growth, and change. We continue to refine how we create an organizational culture and practices that cultivate a supportive work environment. Our organizational and decision-making structure based on sociocracy provides a collaborative and distributed leadership structure.
PBP is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive organization. We do this by ensuring that our hiring practices are equitable in each stage of a process. One way this shows up is by anonymizing application data when we do an initial review in an effort to reduce bias. In order to make sure the resume you share is easy for the software to read, we recommend you upload the document as a simply formatted Microsoft Word file or PDF. This will help the platform to capture your experience accurately.
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