16,334 active roles, straight from company career pages.
Operations is one of those functions that everyone relies on and almost no one can define cleanly. It sits at the center of how a company actually runs, distinct from the project managers who govern timelines and deliverables, distinct from the logistics and supply-chain teams who move physical goods, and distinct from the program managers who coordinate cross-functional initiatives. Ops is the connective tissue: the people who design, maintain, and improve the systems that let every other team do its job. Whether that means revenue operations feeding clean data to sales, people operations keeping HR machinery humming, or business operations translating executive strategy into executable process, the through-line is the same. Operations owns the engine, not just the output.
That positioning inside a company org chart matters when you are searching for a role. An operations title at a 40-person startup might mean you are building workflows from scratch and sitting in on board meetings. The same title at a 10,000-person enterprise might mean you are the specialist who owns one slice of a mature system. Neither is better; they are genuinely different jobs. Knowing where ops sits relative to program management and logistics helps you filter faster, ask sharper interview questions, and evaluate whether a role is actually what the posting implies.
JobFerret is currently tracking 16,334 active operations listings. Of those, 18% are remote-eligible. Among roles with a stated location, Costa Mesa, California leads with 141 listings, followed by New York, NY with 48 and San Francisco with 47, with a further 59 listings tagged broadly to the United States and 76 explicitly marked Remote. A significant portion of listings carry no location at all, so filtering by remote or hybrid remains worth doing regardless of your geography.
The heaviest hiring right now is concentrated at a handful of organizations: Anduril Industries has 249 open operations roles, Alo Yoga has 244, SpaceX has 132, Turner Townsend has 116, Bjak Career has 81, and Stripe has 75. That spread across defense technology, consumer retail, aerospace, professional services, fintech, and insurance hints at something important: operations is not a sector-specific function. The skills transfer, and the demand is broad.
Project and program managers are typically accountable for a defined initiative with a start and end date. They coordinate people and resources to hit a milestone, then move on. Operations roles are more often accountable for ongoing systems and processes with no finish line. An ops manager is still responsible for that process six months after a project manager has closed out the launch and moved to the next thing. In practice the boundaries blur, especially at smaller companies, but that is the core distinction to probe in any interview.
Logistics and supply-chain roles are a subset of operations in the broadest sense, but in most company org charts they live in their own function focused on the movement, storage, and sourcing of physical goods. General operations roles are more likely to be process-oriented and cross-functional rather than tied to a specific physical flow. If a posting mentions warehousing, freight, procurement, or inventory, it is almost certainly supply chain. If it mentions tooling, workflows, vendor management, or internal efficiency, it is more likely core ops.
No. Operations leadership is one of the functions where demonstrated process improvement, cross-functional influence, and measurable efficiency gains consistently outweigh formal credentials. Many senior ops leaders come up through analyst roles, customer success, finance, or even engineering. An MBA can help in certain industries or at certain company stages, but it is rarely listed as a hard requirement in the listings on JobFerret.