Program Manager / Systems Administrator (Operations as a Service)

We spent a year building an operating system for a dive center in Isla Mujeres. It works. Almost nobody uses it. That sentence is the job.

The Chilam Group installs the operating system, the back office and a rented executive team into businesses that are one person wide: mid-market, profitable, run by a founder who is still the best practitioner of his trade and who cannot carry four fractional executives at US rates. We are not software and we are not consulting. We deliver the finished work, and the system is why it costs what it costs.

From 1 October we carry four bodies of work at once. One client live since April, the dive center, where the whole thing was built and proved. A second and larger one starting that day: a multi-entity audiovisual group in New York, two states, with a roll-up behind it, buying the whole product rather than a piece of it. Our own product infrastructure, which does not exist yet and decides whether this is a platform or a pile of installations. And a pro bono installation at a federal conservation agency, paid for by a third party.

Until now two of us have done all of it, and one is leaving. This seat is the one in the middle.

THE THREE PARTS OF THE JOB

1 · PROGRAM MANAGER, ACROSS EVERY ENGAGEMENT

• The plan of record per client: phased, dated, with acceptance criteria per deliverable.

• The cadence, as a contract rather than a habit. Daily owner digest, weekly memo and owner call, fortnightly critical-route report, monthly status, quarterly scope review. If a cycle stops firing, that is a finding we report, not a gap we cover.

• The two clocks, and which one governs. The client calendar is contractual: fifty-two weeks, dated deliverables, written acceptance criteria, and it does not move. The outside engineering house runs on six-week cycles with fixed appetite and variable scope. When a cycle runs out of room the scope inside it gives way and the client date does not. Holding that line in your hands rather than in principle is most of this hat.

• The decision machinery. Decisions reach the owner batched on a fixed day, each carrying the question in one line, the options with their costs, a named recommendation, which way the door swings, and what happens by default if he says nothing. Anything unreturned in five business days comes back at the top of the next batch, marked as blocking.

• The commitment register, and the single channel to the client's staff, accountants, labor counsel, notaries, vendors and the outside engineering house.

2 · SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, CLIENT-SIDE AND OUR OWN

• Tenancy, environments, release windows and the record of what shipped when. You do not write the product code; you own the discipline around it.

• Identity and access: an access register that is current, a tested revocation runbook, separation of duties as design. A client is entitled to know in writing what we can reach and how fast we can be shut out.

• The vendor estate: what each tool is for, what it costs, who approves it, when it renews, what breaks if it stops.

• Our own estate, which has never had an owner: machines, disk encryption and backup, our domain and mail, hosting, DNS, repositories and deploys.

• Enablement and training. Every person here works inside the same stack. You set them up in it, write the onboarding path per role, and run training as a program with a register rather than as a favor between other things.

3 · INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR, THE HALF A PROJECT-MANAGEMENT TITLE DOES NOT DESCRIBE

You read the record, find what nobody reported, write the policy that fixes it, get a decision on it, land it as an entry in a register and a behavior on a screen, and then explain to the owner what runs now and what is gating the rest.

Two runs of that loop from a single week:

• A deposit field reading zero across every booking in the system, while payments were in fact arriving before the trip, became a written policy with thresholds, a carve-out and a non-retroactivity clause; a decision in twelve hours after eleven days of silence, once it was rewritten in the owner's language; then a register entry, a screen behavior and a desk procedure the same day. Six days start to finish.

• A cash position reading twelve days stale, with two people reading different numbers for the same account on the same day, became a standing daily instruction with a named format, a deadline, a rule that a balance comes from the statement and never from summing movements, and an explicit exception path. One day.

You would also personally own the compliance service layer: eleven verticals per legal entity, the obligations engine and its status reporting, the accountant and specialist network, and the data room.

THE AUTHORITY THAT COMES WITH IT

Every action that reaches a client surface passes through the principal today, and that gate has jammed three documented times. So this seat comes with a written authority document rather than a title: a named list of action classes you release without me, a named list you do not, a written threshold on spend and on client communication, and a review of the boundary at ninety days. It is signed before day one.

The five-day rule runs against me as well as for you. Anything I do not return in five business days comes back at the top of the next batch marked as blocking, with the thing it is holding named, and putting it there is your job.

HARD REQUIREMENTS

• Bilingual at business level, English and Spanish. You will negotiate a cost assumption in English and correct an accountant in Spanish, often the same afternoon.

• Two or more full implementation cycles as functional lead. Discovery, blueprint, data migration, UAT, cutover, stabilization. Mid-market, not only enterprise. You have lived through a cutover rather than read about one.

• Enough SQL to go to the database and count. Not negotiable. Every open failure class here starts with the sentence "a screen said X."

• Comfortable with no C-suite above you. There is no operations director and no controller. If you need a structure to receive you, this is the wrong seat.

• Fluent with agentic tooling, or fast enough to get there inside a month. This firm runs on it.

STRONGLY PREFERRED

• Multi-entity and multi-currency work with cross-border consolidation.

• Credibility in an asset-and-crew vertical: equipment rental, events, logistics, construction, field services.

• Lived Mexican compliance, not to execute it but to know when an accountant is wrong.

• Instructional design or certification experience.

WHAT THIS JOB IS NOT

A developer. A board administrator. A strategist. Strategy has an owner, and a tidy board does not fix a cost model with five live derivations. The limits below are written, and they protect you first:

• No client bank credentials.

• No authorizing and no executing payments. You administer the queue. Somebody else approves and somebody else executes.

• No signing for a client and no representing a client before an authority.

• No hiring or firing of a client's staff.

• No committing spend, including the subscriptions you request.

• No writing code into the product. The engineering house builds.

• No private channel to a client. Everything that touches a client goes through the principal's channel.

• No second site manager. Someone else runs the method on one site six days a week. You decide what of it is transferable and write it down.

COMPENSATION AND TERMS

Mexican payroll with full IMSS and INFONAVIT registration, plus a performance bonus paid through our US entity, plus relocation and housing support for the initial period. Relocation supported: initial period alone, family after, if it works. The band is discussed on the first call, against your number and ours.

HOW WE HIRE

Not a career interview. Three working sessions on real material:

1. A real overhead register and several live derivations of the same daily cost figure. Which one is canonical, how you prove it, and what you instrument so there is never more than one again.
2. A complete checklist library that nobody runs. A sixty-day plan to a defensible usage rate, without adding headcount.
3. The master data of a live tenant and the module list. Classify: product canon, client configuration, and bespoke that should stop being bespoke.

Ask before you apply and we will send you the role brief. It says plainly what is broken here.

js@thechilamgroup.com