Operations Manager - London Sort Centre

You will report to the Site Manager/Head of Site and will run shifts at one of our Hybrid Sort Centres (HSCs), leading 50–100+ operatives through high-volume, time-pressured sortation where minutes matter and small deviations cascade into missed deadlines. Each of our HSCs handle over 40 million parcels annually, with our largest site measuring more than 300,000 sq ft. You will also be accountable for whether the site is measurably better in a month than it is today for each of our key metrics. You are on the floor for your shift, every shift. This is not a project role with occasional site visits and it is not a desk job, the forward work happens along with running the operation.

Responsibilities

Run shifts at one of our Hybrid Sort Centres (HSCs), leading 50–100+ operatives through high-volume, time-pressured sortation; Accountable for whether the site is measurably better in a month than it is today for each of our key metrics; Deliver shift plan end to end: people deployment, throughput, quality standards, and health & safety compliance; Lead, develop, and performance-manage a frontline team of 50–100+ operatives; Build controls, cadences, metrics, SOPs, change management and own their adoption; Plan ahead for future shifts: labour, training, and risks; Own the end-of-shift handover: what happened, what is at risk, what the next shift needs to know; Stay decisive through volume peaks, outages, and labour gaps. Triage, solve the problem at hand quickly, contain the impact, restore flow; Present and write clearly whether briefs, escalations, handovers or post-incident reviews; Implement changes into a live operation such as introducing robotics, launching new sortation tech or onboarding new clients

Requirements

Scaled something from zero: a site, a market, a process or a program.; Managed a physical operation: quick commerce, grocery, e-commerce fulfillment, last mile, 3PL, food production, airport ground handling, rail. Anywhere with a hard cut off and people on the floor.; Communicate in both directions and have strong people management skills: you can brief 80 operatives at shift start and take a problem to senior leadership the same day.; Built a mechanism that held: a control, a cadence, a metric, a document standard. Something you authored that changed how frontline teams worked.; Own numbers rather than report them: you can name a metric you created or redefined, explain why the previous one was wrong, and say what changed afterwards.; Understand frontline work: one of these must be true: you have personally led frontline teams; you have worked embedded in and around a frontline population day to day, without the reporting line; or you have been accountable for outcomes delivered by frontline people you did not employ.

Nice to have

Program Manager in a logistics or e-commerce business; Operations Excellence and Continuous Improvement; Strategy & Operations; Transformation manager; Launch and Expansion Manager; Regional operations manager; corporate operations; central operations inside large UK retailers and carriers; quick commerce and marketplace operators; Consulting backgrounds where you implemented, not only recommended