About China Insider

China Insider is one of the largest English-language media brands covering China, reaching millions every month across social platforms. We work with brands, partners, and institutions who want to reach that audience.

We are a fully remote, AI-first company. Everyone here works across more than their title suggests.

AI Operations Manager

AI OperationsRemoteFull-time

Own the AI systems that run this company — proposing new ones, building them, and keeping them alive.

You will work with AI coding agents rather than a traditional engineering team. This role both decides what gets automated next and makes it happen.

What you'll do

Identify manual work across the business and scope AI projects to remove it
Build new pipelines, automations, and internal tools using AI coding agents
Take projects from proposal to running system, including the parts nobody enjoys
Own monitoring, alerting, and incident response across everything in production
Watch output quality across everything in production
Manage AI provider quotas, costs, rate limits, and fallbacks across vendors
Own backups, credentials, deployments, and documentation

What we're looking for

You have built things and kept them running in production — both halves matter
Working knowledge of Python, databases, and cloud infrastructure
Ability to scope a project yourself rather than wait for a specification
Instinct to direct an AI agent to a solution rather than hand-write everything
Judgment about what needs attention now and what can wait

Nice to have

DevOps, platform engineering, or solo technical founder background
Experience running LLM systems in production

Why China Insider

Your work reaches millions. What you make goes out to one of the largest English-language audiences for China anywhere, and it goes out in your first week. Very few places let you see the effect of your own decisions at this scale, this fast.

No repetitive work. AI does the dull parts. What is left is judgment, relationships, and decisions.

Flat. A non-hierarchical startup — no departments, no approval chains. If you need a decision, you ask one person.

Wide scope. Nobody here does one narrow thing. You will find out quickly what you are actually good at.

Real ownership. We give people whole outcomes rather than tasks. The wins are yours and so are the mistakes.

What we offer

Work from anywhere — we have no office and never have
Flexible hours, judged on output rather than availability
Paid time off
An annual team retreat
A learning and development budget
A coworking space stipend