Operations Manager - West Midlands 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; Be on the floor for your shift, every shift; Be 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 covering 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, risks); Own end-of-shift handover; Stay decisive through volume peaks, outages, and labour gaps; Present and write clearly for 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; Communicate in both directions and have strong people management skills (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; Own numbers rather than report them (created or redefined a metric, explained why the previous one was wrong, and what changed afterwards); Understand frontline work: personally led frontline teams, worked embedded with frontline population, or 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; Consulting backgrounds with implementation experience.