Operations & People Lead

Three days a week, contract basis · Remote, UK or Europe

We're a twenty-three person independent agency, founded in 2015. Brand identity, design and development for established businesses, luxury brands and ambitious B2B clients. Mostly UK, with people in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Cyprus.

The role

We've built something we're proud of: a performance and growth cycle, goal setting that cascades from the annual strategy, structured onboarding, a monthly All Hands, and the rituals that keep a remote team feeling like one. This role owns all of it.

What we'd love is someone who pushes it further. Makes learning and development a real part of how people grow here. Works out what recognition looks like across five countries. Keeps our rituals meaningful, and invents the next ones. Spots the thing nobody's spotted, and builds the thing nobody's thought of yet.

Day to day is the upkeep: leave, access, the small rituals, keeping our knowledge hub in Notion current, chasing the actions from the last leadership call. Month to month it's the All Hands, the budgets, and checking the rhythms are holding. Then a few times a year it goes big – the performance and growth cycle, goal setting, the meetup.

You'd work with our founders and heads of commercial, design and development. Nobody reports to you, but you'd be in touch with the whole team.

What you'd own

• The performance and growth cycle, twice a year. The leads have the conversations with their own people. You run everything around them: dates, comms, chasing the forms, pulling feedback together, keeping everyone to time. Same for goal setting once the annual strategy lands.
• The employee lifecycle end to end. Offers, contracts, onboarding, leave, sickness, exits, and the send-off when someone goes.
• Hiring, a couple of times a year. The role brief, the posting, the scheduling, and keeping candidates in the loop so nobody's left hanging.
• Learning and development. What people want to learn, what's approved, whether the days actually get taken, and booking the trainers and workshops.
• Helping the team through changes in how we work. We're in the middle of one now with AI, and the tooling side is covered. What isn't is the human part: the training, the framing, and helping people adjust when the shape of their work changes underneath them.
• Our company initiatives, so the quarterly review is a conversation rather than a scramble the week before.
• The monthly All Hands. Gathering content from the leads, building the deck, holding the running order.
• Culture, which mostly means noticing. Whether the rhythm works as well for someone in Cyprus as someone in Manchester. Whether a ritual has quietly died. Whether recognition is reaching the right people. And building something better when the answer's no. Plus the practical end: the meetup, the merch, the gifting.
• Pulse surveys and the end of year retro. Asking properly, reading honestly, and turning it into something that changes.
• Our tools and kit. What we use, what it costs, what's earning its keep, and making sure people have machines that work. Notion especially, which is our handbook, knowledge base and process documentation, and only works if people trust it.
• Policies, records and the handbook. Right to work, personnel files, and keeping everything current and correct.
• The budgets underneath: learning and development, the meetup, perks and gifting, and what our tools cost. We set them, you spend them well.

How we work

We hold each other to four things: being genuinely human, raising the bar and then raising it again, zero ego and all action, and bringing good energy. They're what we hire on and what we give feedback against, and you'd help us keep them honest.

Who we think you are

• Someone who's run the internals of a small creative business before. An agency or studio ideally, though we care more about the shape of the job you've done than the sector.
• You've held a rhythm across a team that didn't report to you and made it stick. You're organised enough to keep several things moving without dropping any, and happy doing the work rather than advising on it. Comfortable making things happen through other people's conversations rather than having them yourself.
• A clear, direct communicator, in writing and in person. A lot of what crosses your desk will be personal.
• Good instincts about people, and a sense of what's yours to carry and what needs a founder.
• You've probably rebuilt something that wasn't working. A performance process, a learning budget nobody used, an onboarding that didn't land.

Who you'd be doing it for

Twenty-three people who genuinely like each other. Designers, developers, writers and PMs spread across five countries, who take the work seriously and themselves less so. There's a lot of care in how this team treats each other, and this role exists to look after that.

Three days a week, contract basis, invoiced monthly. Fully remote.

Competitive day rate – tell us yours.