All Things Urban

Dark Matter Labs focuses on accelerating societal transition towards collective care, shared agency, long-termism and interconnectedness in a context of climate breakdown and technological disruption. Our daily work ranges from policy and regulation to finance and data, from governance and democratic participation to organisational culture and identity.

This role is crucial for the integrity of all of Dark Matter Lab’s work in the Netherlands and across much of Europe/the EU. We are looking to find a team member to journey with us in building a robust structure of our company in the Netherlands, leading the Operations, Governance Project Oversight and Finance management activities.

Dark Matter Labs focuses on accelerating societal transition towards collective care, shared agency, long-termism and interconnectedness in a context of climate breakdown and technological disruption. Our daily work ranges from policy and regulation to finance and data, from governance and democratic participation to organisational culture and identity.

This work sits within our Organisational Development team. Excitingly, this is part of a network of Operations Managers that we are establishing within Dm. You will work alongside Operations Managers in UK and Sweden and in Canada, supporting each other with complimentary skillsets to lead the integrity of our international operating infrastructure.

In this role your focus will likely be split across some key areas of work, and will in part be responsive to needs. You will have high autonomy to shape and drive where energy is placed, ensuring a high level of integrity of our systems and work in the Netherlands

These might include:

• People Operations

  Supporting the hiring of roles in the Netherlands and across Europe, including through marketing and communications. Delivering operational onboarding processes such as setting up payrolls (including shadow and remote payrolls for employees outside of the Netherlands), issuing employment contracts, executing benefits provision, ensuring workplace health procedures are supportive to team members, creating a shortlist of suggested coaching and psychotherapy support offers.

• Project Operations

  Working with project teams on bidding, project management, expenses and travel management, logistics, tool set-up, managing contracts and invoicing schedules for the team in the Netherlands.
  This will also include preparing cost reporting and financial claims for contracts that we operate with European funding bodies.

• Financial Operations

  Playing a critical role in financial administration for Dm Netherlands, including bookkeeping, raising invoices, updating processes and liaising with partners of payments and with accountants, and supporting the Transfer Pricing calculations for Dm Netherlands.

• Company Governance

  Supporting the legal governance processes of Dm Netherlands, including organising Board meetings and their content and processes, planning and comms; taking, distributing and filing official records; collaborating with the company’s Directors to ensure the integrity of the entity. This may also include scoping out the potential of a wider Non-Executive Board and managing the process to recruit and onboard them.

• Organisational operations

  Playing a key role in the logistical and practical preparation of face-to-face gatherings; helping to shape and propose possible futures for Dm Netherlands; taking part in Dm-wide strategy, sense-making and information-sharing sessions.

• Communications

  Executing some of the general communications related to Dm Netherlands in Dutch and English, sharing content (simple updates on website, social media, medium platforms etc) and engaging partners. There is also scope to build out and share Dm content in Dutch.

We expect that the balance between these areas will regularly shift and rebalance, and will be tailored somewhat to your interest, knowledge and skills. The work has a strong focus on practical execution (at least 75%); it also encompasses process design, strategic thinking, internal reflection and team communication.

Essential criteria:

• Dutch and English speaking (ability to conduct business in both)
• Some experience/learning in company business and operations management (we think this will be important for you to have confidence and autonomy in this work)

Beyond this, we are completely open to what your background might be.

We are particularly interested in people who bring experience and/or knowledge in one of the following areas in the context of the Netherlands and wider Europe:

• EU funding financial reporting and claims
• Recruitment and talent curation
• Company governance and legal architecture
• Project/organisational tech and software
• Travel and event management and logistics

Some areas of experience that might make the learning curve easier (but are not strictly essential) include:

• Knowledge and experience using Xero for online bookkeeping or equivalent cloud software
• Experience and learning from building operational and business systems from the ground up
• Understanding of compliance and regulation in the Netherlands
• Experience working in a remote workplace in an international small mission-led organisation
• Experience in navigating self-managed and dynamic work environments
• Experience in communications of different forms - creative communications (graphics, poetry, illustrations, storytelling) would be a huge bonus

We're a multi-disciplinary and distributed team based internationally, primarily across North America, Europe and South Korea. What's important to us is using the context and local conditions of projects to grow our knowledge and use it to iterate our knowledge and practice across all of our work. We pride learning, experimentation and intuition, and look to provide members of the team ways in which they can grow their own knowledge and practice. We view how we work as an evolving design that you would be part of shaping.

Here's a little on how we currently organise:

• We all work remotely, with flexible working hours around schedules (most people do main hours between 9-6 but many vary).
• We work as self-managing dynamic hierarchies. There aren’t fixed line managers or fixed JDs - we have different areas of expertise and focus and we pick up and shed roles as required. This requires good communication, high emotional intelligence and strong relational practice.
• We run on a series of digital tools that we use daily to coordinate. We check-in with different schedules across our teams, projects, missions and across the whole organisation to share what we are building and learning as we go. Open and declarative working is a critical feature to enabling the autonomy that we each work with.
• We're organised in multidisciplinary working groups that span core missions (spacial justice, natural environment, intangible infrastructures). Each working group is flexible and spans a series of projects to form a portfolio of work. These structures are currently being reviewed and iterated as part of a move to a new evolution of our work.
• In time and experience, we invite everyone to grow our portfolio of work as a way to grow our collective skills, knowledge, and ideas – this is an invitation, not an obligation.

We also engage regularly for joint learning and development which include:

• DM download – a regular meet up (usually online) to compound learning in critical domains of our work.
• Periodic face-to-face gatherings for the whole team - currently planned every 200 days.

You will be supported by the wider Dark Matter Labs team (currently circa 60) and connect with them remotely on a day-to-day basis. Your closest teams will likely be those in Organisational Development; those based in the Netherlands that you can meet and co-work with; and those contracted through Dm Netherlands.

Folloing Company wide pay formula - outlined in Job Advert

We’re not fully sure whether this role is open to international candidates. If you would need visa sponsorship or work authorisation, we recommend checking directly with the employer before applying.