Description
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.
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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Benefits No specific benefits mentioned.
Hiring Process
- Initial screen (15 min)
- Hiring Manager conversation (90 min) - 45 min onsite interview immediately followed by a 45 min site tour where you shadow an existing shift manager
- Final interview (45 min). Decision and offer within 48 hours