Operations Manager - West Midlands Sort Centre
Role Summary
Join Relay as an Operations Manager in West Midlands, Germany, overseeing high-volume sortation and a dynamic team in a rapidly scaling logistics company.
About the Organisation
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 seenRelay’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 experimentationThe 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.
Minimum Requirements
You do not need to have worked in parcels, fulfilment, or sortation. Several of our most talented people had not.
- 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 and around a frontline population day to day, without the reporting line; or you have been accountable for outcomes delivered by frontline people you did not employ.
Eligibility Criteria
Eligible candidates should have relevant experience in operations and management in logistics.
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