Operations and Strategy Manager

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 ABOUT THE ROLE We have 600+ pitstop partners across the UK, and that number is growing fast. Each one needs to be onboarded, kept performing, coordinated with our Middle Mile operation, and supported when things go wrong. Right now, a lot of what makes that work sits in people's heads: tribal knowledge, manual processes, and one-off fixes that don't scale. This role is about changing that. You'll own the systems side of our Pitstop operation: figuring out how things should work, designing the infrastructure to make them repeatable, and working with product and engineering to actually build it. You won't just be analysing problems. You'll be fixing them in a way that holds at 10x the current scale. We're looking for someone who thinks in systems, writes with clarity, and gets things built. Prior experience in a fast-moving ops or strategy role is important; so is the ability to hold your own in a room with engineers. AS THE OPERATIONS AND STRATEGY SENIOR ASSOCIATE AT RELAY, YOU CAN EXPECT TO: - Take messy, manual Pitstop workflows and turn them into something that actually scales, documenting how they work, where they break, and what it takes to make them run without constant intervention - Set clear standards for what good pitstop performance looks like, build the measurement frameworks around those standards, and make sure the right people have visibility when we're off track - Build value extraction loops that turn operational data into genuine improvements over time, rather than reports that get read once and forgotten, with each iteration making the next one easier - Be the connective tissue between Pitstop operations and technical teams: writing specs, shaping roadmap priorities, and staying close to delivery until the thing is actually working - Own the performance of the systems you build, not just the design. The goal is to build things that compound, where each improvement makes the next one cheaper and faster to ship. If something isn't working, you're the one who figures out why and fixes it - Stay close enough to the operation to keep finding the next problem worth solving, and build the case for why it matters Example projects you'll work on: - Loss attribution agent: today, when a parcel goes missing at a pitstop, attribution is manual, inconsistent, and rarely closes the loop. Design and deploy an agent that monitors scan events in real time, identifies the loss scenario, attributes responsibility automatically, and triggers the right response (whether that's a pitstop notification, a charge, or an escalation to the ops team). The agent should get smarter over time as edge cases are resolved and encoded - Pitstop launch system: the current process is largely manual and error-prone. Design a scalable, instrumented go-live system where every step is documented, checked, and owned, so we can activate hundreds of pitstops a week without incidents - Pitsto