Head of Operations

Department: Operations

Reports to: Founder/CEO

Job title: Head of Operations

Employment Type: Full-time

Salary: £75,000 - £80,000

Location: Remote, UK-based, with monthly London meetups

About Gocertify

Gocertify is a bootstrapped UK tech start-up helping brands run smarter, more targeted reward campaigns.

We verify eligible audiences such as students, key workers and seniors, so brands can move away from broad discounting, protect brand value and offer the right rewards to the right customers.

We are trusted by 500+ brands, including Samsung, Sainsbury's and FARFETCH. We work with 2m+ shoppers a year, drive £125m+ in retail sales, and have grown profitably and bootstrapped since 2020.

We are a remote team of around 20 people, with monthly meetups in London. We have scaled by staying lean and highly productive, and we are intentional about protecting that agility as we grow. That means keeping our systems lightweight and our ownership clear, so the team can execute quickly, make good decisions and scale without unnecessary process.

Why this role exists

We’re a lean company and have grown profitably since 2020 with no outside investment, and we want to keep that edge as we scale. To do that, we need someone to run the operational side of the business properly, not just add headcount.

The foundations are strong: a good team, real momentum, and specialist support across finance, people, legal and infosec. What's missing is a senior operator who owns how the company runs day to day, ties these areas together, and keeps everything moving without adding weight.

You'll pick up a broad operational remit, get into the detail, and improve how things work. You'll use good tooling, automation and AI to do it: pulling insight from company meetings, building Airtable interfaces to manage contracts, using Claude to dig into client performance. We want someone who gets genuinely excited by that kind of leverage.

This is not a strategy-only, chief-of-staff or project-management role, and it's not about building automations. You need to have owned the core ops areas yourself, not managed them from a distance.

What's already in place

• An operating rhythm: fortnightly all-hands, monthly co-working, quarterly reviews.
• A People Lead who owns people strategy and delivery.
• A Senior Ops Manager who leads data protection and infosec.
• Fractional finance support: a CFO, Finance Manager and a Finance Analyst.
• External legal support when we need it.
• Two assistants, one within Ops, with room to add more where it makes sense.

You'll help these areas work together, improve what's there, and make sure each owner has the context and systems to follow through.

You won't be the specialist in every area. But you do need enough real experience across them to know what good looks like, ask the right questions, spot risks and make sensible trade-offs.

What the first phase looks like

To fix what's not working, you first have to see it. In your first few months you'll take on a broad, hands-on remit and get to know how Gocertify runs.

That's likely to include:

• Finance: month-end reviews, oversight of invoicing and debtors, payroll changes, supplier management.
• Legal, compliance and data protection: contracts, DPAs, GDPR, ISO 27001, insurance, vendor checks.
• Shopper support: tooling and operational readiness.
• Systems and tooling: automations, device management, access, documentation in Notion.
• Company rhythm: SLT cadence, all-hands, quarterly planning and reviews.
• Cross-functional and commercial work where ownership needs strengthening.

Some of this stays with you long term. Some you'll improve, automate or hand off. It covers a lot of ground, so you'll need to enjoy the breadth, focus on what matters most, and start improving things from day one.

Where the work is too much for one person, we'll hire or share it out. We won't expect you to carry everything forever.

This phase is about understanding how we run before you improve it.

Role and scope

Your job is to make the company easier to run as it grows.

You'll own the operating rhythm, lead cross-functional projects that need a clear owner, and improve the day-to-day workflows that keep the business moving.

You'll line manage the People Lead, the Senior Ops Manager and the Finance Manager, keeping both functions tied to company priorities and working as one joined-up system.

You'll work closely with the Founder, the leadership team and the specialist owners across finance, legal and revenue. The aim is simple: important work has a clear owner, the right amount of structure, and enough momentum to move on its own.

What you'll focus on

1. Strengthen the operational foundations
• Get close to how things work now, find the pain points, and build better ways of doing them. Test, iterate, and keep going until they work in practice.
• Tighten the operational backbone across finance, compliance, support and internal systems.
• Improve tooling, documentation, access and new-starter setup where it's too manual or unclear.
• Build lightweight systems that are fast to use and easy to maintain.
2. Keep complex, cross-team work moving
• Take day-to-day operational follow-up off the Founder and leadership team.
• Own and improve the SLT cadence, all-hands, and quarterly planning and reviews.
• Lead operational projects that cut across teams and need a clear owner.
• Turn messy problems into clear plans, owners and timelines. Unblock work that's stuck between teams.
• Keep priorities visible and add just enough structure, without making the company feel heavy.
3. Lead the ops ecosystem around the business
• Line manage the People Lead, Senior Ops Manager and Finance Manager, and use operational data to support better decisions.
• Keep people, ops, compliance and finance support aligned to company priorities and working as one system.
• Use operational data and context to support better business decisions across the business.

Requirements

What we need from you

Titles matter less than evidence. You might have been a Head of Ops, Operations Lead, Chief of Staff, BizOps or Strategy and Operations lead, or a broad generalist operator in a small, fast-moving business.

You must have hands-on ownership across most of these core ops areas:

• Finance, including the real detail: month-end, VAT, payroll, EMI.
• People and HR.
• Legal and contracts.
• Data protection and GDPR.
• Infosec, ideally including ISO 27001.

You'll also bring:

• Strong ownership and follow-through when things are ambiguous.
• Good judgment and comfort making trade-offs without the full picture.
• Breadth across ops areas, not a narrow specialism.
• Systems thinking, with workflows people actually use.
• A hands-on approach to fixing processes and making them clearer and faster.
• Commercial awareness and comfort with business numbers.
• The credibility to move work through other teams.
• Comfort with tools like Airtable, Make, Claude or similar to build practical improvements.

Who will thrive in this role

This suits a senior generalist who's already run the core ops areas and wants to make a lean, high-output business run better as it grows.

• You get stuck in. You move easily from a high-level chat with the Founder to getting into the detail yourself. . You're not after a fixed playbook.
• You think about whether the work should exist. Your instinct isn't just to fix a broken process but to ask whether it needs to happen at all, and to know when something's worth building properly versus solving simply.
• You're trusted to make the call. Execution here relies on good judgment and clear ownership rather than process for its own sake. You'll need to be comfortable making decisions yourself when day-to-day operational demands compete with the longer-term improvements you want to make.
• You're comfortable in a small, remote business. We're 20 people, fully remote, and there's no office to walk into or big team to hand things to. You'll build relationships and get things done over Slack and calls, with monthly London meetups to reset in person. That suits people who are self-directed and don't need others around them to work well.

Work environment and tools

• Fully remote (UK-based) with monthly in-person meetings in London.
• Core working hours: 10am-4pm UK time with flexible remote work.
• Tools: We run on a broad, modern stack. Our core day-to-day tools are Airtable, Notion, Slack, Front (shared email), Linear (projects and issues), Make (automations) and Google Workspace. We lean heavily on AI tools like Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Lovable to build operating leverage. Across the wider business we also use HubSpot, accounting and payments platforms, contract tooling and password management. You don't need deep experience with all of these. We care more that you're hands-on and quick to pick up new tools.

Benefits

• Salary £75,000 - £80,000
• 25 days annual leave + UK bank holidays
• Private health insurance with AVIVA, including optical and dental cashback and the option to self-fund partners/dependents
• EMI share options
• Work-from-home budget
• Flexible remote work in many countries around our core hours, 10am-4pm UK
• Unlimited access to coworking spaces in 48+ countries through Hubble
• Access to incredible Gocertify offers