Operations Manager - Birmingham Sort Centre

Relay is fundamentally reshaping how goods move in an online era. Backed by Europe’s largest-ever logistics Series A ($35M), led by deep-tech investors Plural (whose portfolio spans fusion energy and space exploration), Relay is scaling faster than 99.98% of venture-backed startups. We're assembling the most talent-dense team the logistics industry has ever seen Relay’s Mission is to free commerce from friction. Today, high delivery costs act as a hidden tax on e-commerce, quietly shaping what can be sold online and limiting who can participate. We envision a world where more goods move more freely between more people, making the online shopping experience seamless and accessible to everyone. THE TEAM • ~110 people, more than half in engineering, product and data • 45+ advanced degrees across computer science, mathematics and operations research • Thousands of data points captured, calculated, analysed and predicted for every single parcel we handle • An intellectually vibrant culture of first‑principles thinking, tight feedback loops and relentless experimentation THE ROLE Top-of-market salary, with above market equity in one of Europe’s top Series A startups. This role is the pathway to becoming a General Manager of your own Hybrid Sort Centre with up to 1 Million parcels a day capacity. You will own an entire shift at one of our fulfilment sites; the people, the throughput, the quality, and the continuous improvement of all three. You’ll lead 50–100+ operatives through high-volume, time-pressured operations where minutes matter and small deviations cascade quickly into missed deadlines and customer impact. Think of it as running a logistics mission that resets every single day and you use the learnings of one shift to improve the next. If you’ve managed large field teams in logistics, distribution, manufacturing, transport, or the military then you already understand the tempo. If you haven’t worked in parcels or sortation before, that’s fine. Some of our best managers hadn’t either. What matters is how you think and lead. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Run shift operations end-to-end: people deployment, throughput targets, quality standards, and health & safety compliance - Lead, motivate, and develop a frontline team of 50–100+ operatives; including onboarding, coaching, and managing performance - Use dashboards and KPIs to identify problems early, make decisions quickly, and track whether the changes you make are actually working - Build and improve SOPs, controls, and feedback loops that keep your shift running safely and efficiently. You won’t just follow them, but write them - Own the end-of-shift handover; what happened, what’s at risk, what the next shift needs to know - Collaborate across shifts with engineering, data, and ops leadership to solve problems that cross boundaries - Stay calm and decisive during peak periods, outages, and labour gaps - triaging, containing impact, and restoring flow WHO YOU ARE You don’t need to have worked in parcels, fulfilment, or sortation. What you need is: - Proven leadership of large teams (50+) of front line workers in fast-paced, physical operations — logistics, distribution, manufacturing, transport, military, or similar environments where on-time delivery and compliance are non-negotiable - Reasoning ability — you think through problems methodically rather than relying on “how we’ve always done it.” When you walk into a new situation, you structure a response rather than freeze - Resilience — when things break, you get calmer and more structured, not flustered. You’ve been through operational crises and came out the other side having learned something - Metrics obsessed — You don’t need to be a data analyst, but you need to be able to look at a metric and decide what to do about it. You don’t need to design the metric, but you do need to understand, own and act on the metric. - Clear, direct communication — you can brief a team of 80 operatives at shift start and then present a problem