Open Innovation Jobs in Texas (NOW HIRING)

General Overview

At ThinkOnward, we're more than a company—we're a global community of experts and problem solvers. Our mission? To inspire and activate our community, uniting their passion, wisdom, and creativity to cleverly solve complex geoscience and data science challenges. Together, we equip our talented community with cutting-edge tools, data, and resources. We specialize in pushing boundaries, fostering collaboration, and delivering innovative solutions that accelerate decisions.

Our three core offerings are helping solve some of the energy industry's biggest challenges.

• Projects create pathways to accelerate results for our clients. We vet and engage specialized talent within our community on flexible, rewarding exploration and energy projects. Our geoscience, engineering, and AI community is driving innovation further and faster, pushing boundaries and redefining what is achievable.
• Challenges allow our community to test their skills and compete in global applied data science competitions. By making data science challenges available to our community, we can quickly and affordably solve complex energy problems head-on, tapping into diverse minds across domains.
• Innovation Lab is a collaborative space where we bring all the pieces of the ThinkOnward ecosystem together to deliver impactful innovations for our customers. The convergence of science, data, and AI-driven tools allows us to identify, research, and cultivate revolutionary approaches and ideas to solve our customers' most pressing challenges.

Our values—Re-Imagine What Matters, Get It Done, Fail Fast, and No Ego—guide us. Our vision is to be the platform that empowers energy companies to accelerate decision-making, evolve workflows, and achieve impactful results through our global community, advanced AI/ML technology, and open innovation model.

Summary:

We are seeking an exceptional Executive Support Lead & Business Operations professional who thrives in a dynamic environment and is motivated by the opportunity to contribute across multiple areas of the business. This role is instrumental in enabling the CEO and Leadership Team to operate effectively, ensuring priorities are well-coordinated and execution runs smoothly across the organization. The position will begin with a focused scope centered on executive support, with a clear path to expand into broader operational responsibilities as the individual builds context, trust, and readiness.

What You'll Do

Executive Support & Prioritization

• Manage the CEO's complex calendar, ensuring strategic prioritization of time, alignment with organizational goals and coordination of meetings with other top industry executives with equally busy schedules.
• Oversee all travel logistics and expense management for the CEO with efficiency and discretion.
• Proactively manage the CEO's inbox and correspondence, ensuring timely responses and appropriate escalation and closure of critical matters.
• Anticipate the CEO's needs and emerging needs of the team and stakeholders, identify potential conflicts or risks, and proactively develop action and contingency plans.
• Track and manage CEO's and your own critical and urgent tasks to ensure triage, escalation, and closure on a timely basis, ranked on urgency and impact

Board & Executive Governance

• Coordinate and facilitate all Board of Directors engagements, including scheduling, logistics, and preparation of high-quality, engaging materials.
• Partner with the CEO to lead and manage end-to-end execution of monthly Executive Committee meetings and quarterly Board meetings, ensuring alignment on priorities, progress, and outcomes.
• Drive the development of high-quality materials—including polished pre-reads—delivered in advance of Board and executive sessions. Coordinate content inputs from across the Leadership Team and individual contributors ensuring adequate lead time and review time to avoid last-minute delivery.

Strategic & Operational Enablement

• Prepare and synthesize information and prepare agendas focused on key decisions, creating space for discussion and decisions for executive discussions, including Leadership Team meetings, Board sessions, and external engagements.
• Capture key insights, decisions, and action items from high-impact meetings, ensuring disciplined follow-up and timely execution across the organization.
• Provide strategic support to the CEO and leadership team on operational priorities, helping drive execution timelines and organizational alignment.
• Co-own Leadership Team agendas, ensuring focus on critical priorities and effective use of executive time in weekly and quarterly forums.
• Stay ahead of events calendar, identifying, scoping, directing, and delivering work products needed to support upcoming engagements and events. Function as an extension of the CEO to assist in driving repetitive tasks and act as a force multiplier to take high level steer to innovate and deliver against new challenges.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with HR, Finance, and Delivery teams to spot improvement opportunities and streamline workflows to improve operational efficiency.
• Support executive leadership with preparation of reports, presentations, and key documents for internal and external audiences.

Confidentiality & Judgment

• Handle highly sensitive and confidential information with the utmost discretion and professionalism.
• Apply sound judgment and deep understanding of company operations, policies, and leadership priorities to support decision-making and execution.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of progressively responsible experience supporting senior executives, ideally in a high-growth or dynamic environment, with demonstrated success in executive support and operations.
• Strong understanding of business operations and administrative functions, with the ability to navigate systems, processes, and organizational dynamics effectively.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Office and collaboration tools (Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Word), with the ability to produce polished, executive-ready materials
• Knowledge and experience leveraging GenAI tools like Microsoft Copilot 365 to accelerate and improve quality of work.
• Exceptional organizational and time management skills, with a proven ability to manage competing priorities, adapt quickly, and consistently deliver high-quality outcomes under pressure.
• Meticulous attention to detail paired with a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset; anticipates needs, identifies risks, and drives issues to resolution independently.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to draft important emails and interface confidently and professionally with executives, Board members, and external stakeholders.
• Demonstrated initiative and sound judgment, with the ability to operate with a high degree of autonomy while maintaining strong alignment with leadership priorities.
• Continuous improvement mindset, with a natural ability to identify opportunities to streamline processes and enhance efficiency.
• High level of discretion and integrity, with experience handling confidential and sensitive information in a professional environment.
• Collaborative and adaptable work style, capable of operating effectively as both an independent contributor and a trusted partner across teams.

Time Commitment / Travel Requirements

• Full-Time
• 5-10% Travel expected