[Remote] Development Operations Manager

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Semilla Nueva develops biofortified maize seeds and partnerships to improve nutrition, farmer income, and resilience to climate shocks. The Development Operations Manager will build and manage fundraising systems, pipeline processes, reporting, metrics, and accountability mechanisms to support donor cultivation, solicitation, stewardship, and renewals.

Responsibilities

• Maintain a complete, current, and accurate picture of every donor and prospect in the pipeline — stage, owner, next action, next action date, expected amount, and probability
• Run a standing follow-up discipline across the department: no donor goes untouched past an agreed interval, no commitment goes unacknowledged, no proposal deadline arrives unnoticed
• Track every commitment made to and by Semilla Nueva — pledge schedules, reporting deadlines, grant deliverables, site visit promises — and drive the team to deliver on them on time, including our Executive Director and Development Director
• This role carries an explicit mandate from the Executive Director to track, follow up on, and escalate commitments made by anyone in the organization — including leadership
• Escalate stalled relationships and aging opportunities before they go cold
• Design, document, and continuously improve the department's core workflows: prospect qualification, cultivation, solicitation, gift acknowledgment, stewardship, and renewal
• Own and administer our internal development tracker — data structure, fields, stage definitions, automations, permissions, data hygiene, and training the team to use it correctly
• Build the reporting layer: dashboards and recurring reports that show leadership where the money is, what is at risk, and what needs attention this week
• Create the templates, checklists, and standard operating procedures that let the team move faster with less improvisation and more structure
• Define and maintain the department's KPIs — pipeline value by stage, conversion rates, average gift size, cycle time, donor retention and lapse rates, touchpoints per donor, and revenue against target
• Produce a weekly pipeline report and a monthly performance review of results against goals
• Flag variance early and specifically: which numbers are off, why, and what the team is doing about it
• Support annual fundraising goal-setting with clean historical data and realistic projections
• Own the department's meeting cadence: build agendas, circulate materials in advance, capture decisions and action items, and follow up until every item is closed
• Coordinate donor-facing logistics — meetings, calls, farm visits, briefing documents, and follow-up correspondence
• Prepare leadership and board members for donor conversations with accurate, well-organized background material
• Serve as the connective tissue between Development and Finance, Programs, and Communications so that reporting commitments are met with real data
• Build and maintain prospect research and qualification pipelines for new institutional, foundation, and major individual donors
• Track outreach sequences and ensure new-prospect follow-up is as disciplined as existing-donor stewardship

Skills

• • 4+ years in development operations, fundraising, sales operations, program management, or a comparable role where you owned a pipeline and a process
• • Demonstrated experience building systems from scratch — not just operating someone else's
• • Fluency with CRM or pipeline tracking tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, Monday.com, or similar) including configuration, not just data entry
• • Strong command of spreadsheets and comfort turning messy data into clear reporting
• • Exceptional organization and attention to detail. You keep lists, you close loops, and you notice when a number does not reconcile
• • Professional working proficiency in English and Spanish, written and spoken
• • The interpersonal skill to hold peers and senior colleagues accountable feeling comfortable creating productive friction with peers and senior colleagues
• • You follow up. Then you follow up again. It is not nagging to you; it is the job
• • You are systematic by instinct — when you see the same problem twice, you build something so it does not happen a third time
• • You are comfortable being the person who asks “what is the status on this?” every single week
• • You write clearly and concisely
• • You care about the mission and can speak credibly about why this work matters
• • Experience in international development, agriculture, food security, or nutrition
• • Experience with institutional funders, foundations, or bilateral and multilateral grants and their reporting requirements
• • Familiarity with grant compliance and donor reporting cycles
• • Experience training teams on new tools and getting real adoption

Benefits

• Full statutory benefits
• Paid time off
• Professional development support
• Remote US work arrangement with in-office presence expected for donor visits

Company Overview