Operations Manager - West Midlands 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, and a recently closed Series B ($95M), Relay is scaling faster than 99% 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 • ~160 people , around 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 Opportunity 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.   Who will thrive in this role • 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 the mechanisms that hold the operation together. Build controls, cadences, metrics, SOPs, change management and own their adoption, not only their design • Plan ahead for future shifts; labour, training, and the risks you can see coming before they land • 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. Decisions here get made based off what you wrote • Implement changes into a live operation such as introducing robotics, launching new sortation tech or onboarding new clients. We are changing the operations constantly which means you’ll roll change out mid flight and bring your team along the journey.   Who you are • 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 an