ABOUT SPLASH:

Splash is a global nonprofit organization founded in 2007, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA. Since 2007, we have completed more than 2,500 projects that serve over 1.2 million children each day. Currently focused on cities in East and Southern Africa, Splash delivers the clean water, clean toilets, and dignified menstrual health resources that every child deserves through comprehensive water, sanitation, hygiene, and menstrual health (WASH-M) services and behavior change programs across 100% of a city's public schools.

Our model transforms entire cities, starting at the school water fountain, by shifting systems, infrastructure, and behaviors in partnership with local governments and communities. Our vision is global impact without Splash, made possible through partnerships with national governments, co-creation with local communities, and replication far beyond our day-to-day involvement.

Our core values guide everything we do, including every hiring decision we make: People (people first, people second, people third), Quality (beautiful products that function and last), Honesty (no drama, no surprises, no BS), Joy (kids at heart, seeing potential everywhere), and Mistakes (make them, don't repeat them).

Splash values the unique skills and experiences everyone brings to the organization, and we are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and qualified applicants for employment. To learn more, please visit splash.org.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

To apply, please submit the following to openrecruits@headgloballlc.com with “COO, Splash” in the subject line:

• A brief cover letter

• Resume or CV

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

POSITION OVERVIEW:

Splash is at an inflection point. We have proven our model in Ethiopia and India, secured anchor funding at a scale most organizations never see, and committed to reaching hundreds of schools in Zambia in partnership with the national government. What got us here was vision, speed, and a small team that jumps in wherever needed. What the next phase demands is something more: an organization that executes with the same discipline it dreams.

The Chief Operating Officer is the senior leader who makes that true. Reporting to the CEO and serving on the management team, the COO owns how Splash runs: how decisions get made and stick, how work moves across teams, how commitments turn into delivery, and how a growing, globally distributed organization stays coordinated, accountable, and healthy. This is a role with real authority, real direct reports, and real decisions to own, not a coordination function.

The COO is a deliberate complement to our founder and CEO, whose strengths are vision, external partnerships, and government negotiation. The COO brings the operating discipline that turns that vision into consistent execution. The two operate as one voice, with clearly divided decision rights and genuine delegated authority.

A note on how this role sits alongside our incoming Chief Financial Officer, because we are deliberately separating strategic financial leadership from organizational operations. The CFO owns financial strategy, planning, stewardship, controls, and long-term financial sustainability. The COO owns the people, operating infrastructure, and organizational systems through which Splash executes. The two come together around planning, resource allocation, risk, and organizational performance, and this partnership will be one of the closest working relationships in the organization.

Nonprofit COOs often find themselves playing three roles beyond their core functions: the first responder who tackles whatever crosses the organization that fits nowhere else, the co-pilot who serves as thought partner and truth teller to the CEO, and the connector who sits at the intersection of strategy and operations, seeing patterns and linking teams. We are hiring for all three.

ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES:

Executive Leadership and CEO Partnership

• Serve as a core member of the management team, helping set organizational priorities, allocate resources, and hold the leadership team accountable for results.

• Act as a trusted thought partner and honest counterweight to the CEO, with the standing to disagree in private and align in public.

• Own defined decision domains with genuine authority, including the ability to make decisions in the CEO’s absence, under a decision-rights framework built together in the first months.

• Lead the organizational process around board engagement, coordinating papers, inputs, decisions, and follow-up in partnership with the CEO, who owns the substantive board relationships.

Execution Discipline and Organizational Rhythm

• Build and run the organization's operating rhythm: planning cycles, priority setting, progress reviews, and the cadence of management team collaboration.

• Own decision rights and commitment tracking across the leadership team, so every major piece of work has a clear owner, timeline, and closure. Where ambiguity arises, drive to clarity.

• Maintain organizational risk awareness across operations, compliance, and country programs. Surfacing emerging threats early and building mitigation into planning cycles so that the organization is never surprised by what it could have seen coming.

• Strengthen accountability and follow-through across teams, building simple systems people actually use, and ensuring someone is always holding the whole picture.

• Design how the organization absorbs surge moments, such as major funder proposals, by building the staffing, capacity, and review processes so all-hands engagement is deliberate and deadlines are met.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Make cross-team work run well. Priority processes include: putting in place the legal and contractual architecture behind key partnerships (see Functional Leadership below); holding proposal development accountable with clear owners, deadlines, and a quality bar, while authorship and content sit with the Chief Partnerships and Development Officer and the relevant technical leads; technical and budget alignment; staffing strategy; and the handoff between program design and delivery.

• Maintain visibility across teams and projects, connecting dots up, down, and across the organization.

• Partner closely with the Chief Impact and Strategy Officer, the Chief Partnerships and Development Officer, the CFO, and country leadership so that global functions serve delivery rather than slow it.

Functional Leadership

Operations sits with the COO deliberately. At Splash, procurement, contracting, technology, administration, and security are the infrastructure of consistent ways of working across countries and teams, and building that consistency is the core problem this role exists to solve.

• Lead Splash's Operations function, including procurement, administration, technology, and organizational security, with the current operations lead reporting to this role.

• Put in place the legal and contractual architecture Splash operates through: fit-for-purpose agreements across funder types (grants, cooperative and sub-award agreements, framework and draw-down arrangements), implementing partners, vendors, and contractors, so every relationship, from a national government MOU to a local vendor purchase order, runs on clear, appropriately scaled terms rather than one-size-fits-all paperwork.

• Lead People and Culture, ensuring we recruit, develop, and retain a strong global team and that our values are lived, not laminated.

• Build the infrastructure for people to grow and stay: clear job descriptions, transparent pay scales, honest feedback on strengths and gaps, visible recognition of wins, and deliberate pathways for internal mobility and succession.

• Additional functions and special projects may phase into this role over time as the organization grows.

Culture, Change Management, and Internal Communication

• Own the rhythm of internal communication: regular all-team forums, written updates, and clear, consistent messaging of decisions across a distributed global organization.

• Steward organizational culture through growth and change, translating values into concrete practices.

• Bring an internal organizational lens to decisions and strategy, attending to the implications for people, systems, culture, and communication.

• Embed DEI as a practice, not a program: bring an equity lens to every hiring, promotion, and organizational design decision, and hold the organization accountable to its stated values.

Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop direct reports and their teams, building capability and succession.

• Model the leadership charter: resolve conflict directly and kindly, do what you say, lead with curiosity, move fast with care, and celebrate one another.

Qualifications:

• Typically 15+ years of progressively senior leadership experience, including significant time as a COO, deputy director, managing director, senior chief of staff with real functional ownership, or equivalent senior operating leader in an organization navigating growth and complexity. We care about capabilities more than titles, and leaders from less conventional paths, including CFOs who have owned operations and people and found organizational leadership to be their strength, are encouraged to apply.

• Demonstrated success translating strategy into execution: building operating rhythms, decision frameworks, and cross-functional processes that measurably improved how an organization delivers.

• Experience leading functional teams with real management authority, not only influence.

• Experience working closely with a founder or CEO, ideally as their thought-partner and operational counterpart.

• Experience leading distributed, multicultural teams across countries and time zones, with hands-on experience in low- and middle-income countries.

• Experience in global development, global health, WASH, or an adjacent mission-driven sector. Operator excellence matters more than sector pedigree.

• Fluency in how a US-registered nonprofit operates, or the demonstrated ability to build it quickly. Preferable experience obtaining nonprofit credentials in low- and middle-income countries.

IDEAL CANDIDATE:

You are a builder of organizations. You love making complex things run well, and you measure yourself by whether commitments close, teams cohere, and the organization gets stronger every quarter.

• You build systems people actually use and you follow through until they stick.

• You hold people accountable with warmth and directness, and you make it feel like support rather than surveillance.

• You have high emotional intelligence: you read rooms, know when to push and when to step back, and earn trust across very different leaders and cultures.

• You are a confident facilitator who drives discussions to clear decisions, owners, and dates.

• You are comfortable with a founder-led organization: energized by vision and speed, and skilled at channeling both into disciplined delivery.

• You are a doer as well as a leader. No task is beneath you, and your instinct in a gap is to fill it, then fix the system that created it.

• You communicate clearly in writing and in person, across cultures and time zones, with humility and respect.

• You are committed to Splash's mission and values, and to the idea that the best organizations are built to outlast and outgrow any one leader.

ComPensation & Benefits

The expected salary range for this position is $175,000 to $185,000 USD per year, in line with experience.

At Splash, we prioritize our mission by offering benefits that support our employees and their families. Splash operates across time zones with flexible work schedules. Benefits include 18 days of paid time off, increasing by 2 days each year up to 28 days, 11 paid holidays, and Wellness Fridays with reduced hours. We also offer two weeks of paid office closure, one in early July and one in the last week of the year. US employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage and a 401K plan with a 3% match; benefits for employees outside the US are aligned for equity and consider local norms.

Search process and application details to be confirmed with our executive search partner.