Senior Operations Manager

Role Description:DriveSimple helps growing businesses and tradespeople get vans without the financial risk and long lock-ins of traditional leasing. Until now, the choice was an expensive short-term rental or a restrictive four-year lease. We built a third option: flexible van subscription. Contracts start at six months, with no deposit and easy cancellation. One fixed monthly cost covers servicing, maintenance, tax and tyres. Our mission is to help businesses and sole traders get the vans they need to grow, on their terms. The demand exists. You design the playbook and run your own experiments. You report to the CEO, who backs you to change whatever slows a deal down. You start with a product customers love, a working funnel with mapped leaks, a HubSpot CRM in mid-redesign and an experienced sales lead beside you. function scaling fast alongside you.What will you do: Own the fleet from the moment we buy it to the moment we sell it, and the numbers that go with it.Run delivery and collection, so a customer who signs this week is working the next.Build and manage the supplier network, negotiating on price and on turnaround.Own fleet compliance and keep us on the right side of it.Make approvals fast. Work with sales, finance and compliance so no customer waits for the next step.Set the standard for how a van leaves us and how it comes back.Rebuild the operating processes and put them in one system rather than four spreadsheets.Lead the operations team and raise what it can handle as we scale.Bring the CEO the numbers each month, with your read on what to do about them.

Qualifications

5+ years in operations, strategy, or finance in a high-demand, growing environment.A background in vehicle rental, leasing, subscription, logistics or asset finance. You know what a van costs to run and what it is worth when it comes back. OHands-on with a fleet or rental management system and with HubSpot. You run operations from the data, not from memory.Full proficiency with AI tools. You use them daily to research, draft, analyse and automate, and you can build a workflow around them.A supplier negotiator. You have signed garages, transporters or dealers to terms and held them to an SLA.A process builder: you have introduced automation, playbooks or SLAs where none existed, and you can show what changed.Comfortable being measured on utilisation, lead times and cost per vehicle, month after month.At ease with tradespeople, couriers and small business owners, including on the day something has gone wrong.Hands-on: in a company our size, the Senior Operations Manager fixes the problem as well as reports it.What we offer:EU-based, remote-first.Competitive base with a performance bonus A small, fast-moving team. Decisions get made in days; what you ship this month shows in next month's numbers.A freshly funded startup at the point of scale. You build the operations function while the company grows around it, with a direct line to the CEO.