Head of operations

About Us

We're a fast-growing specialist manufacturer based in Brackley, with a strong turnover, growing at 50% year on year and strong margins. We build handcrafted exhausts for motorbikes using high grade materials. We're a small, skilled team that makes high-quality things and we're now at the point where we need to build the operational infrastructure to match our ambition.

We are at an inflection point. The foundations are strong. The order book is growing fast. What we need now is someone to own the operational engine that lets us scale without compromising the thing that makes us worth scaling.

This is a new role. There is no playbook.

The Role

This is an operational leadership role with full ownership of everything between the customer order and the product leaving our door and everything that makes that process better, more consistent, and more scalable over time.

You will report directly to the co-founders and be their operational proxy. That means making decisions, not just recommendations. It means owning COGS without ever letting quality become a lever you pull to hit a number. And it means being the person who, when we ask “what would it take operationally to open a dealer channel?”, comes back with a clear, well-reasoned answer.

Comfortable with ambiguity is not a throwaway line here; we are building the plane while flying it, and you need to be energised by that, not unsettled.

What You Will Own

Quality: Quality comes first in this list deliberately. It is our greatest asset and our north star as a business. You will:

• Own quality standards across the full production process - not as a compliance function but as a genuine expression of what the business stands for
• Lead ISO 9001 accreditation as a structured project, using it to formalise and protect what we already do well

COGS and Commercial Operations

• Maintain ongoing visibility of cost drivers and where margin is made or lost
• Identify cost efficiency opportunities that never compromise quality
• Be the operational voice in commercial conversations - when we consider new pricing, channels, or markets, you bring the numbers

Production and Operations

• End-to-end production planning - capacity, scheduling, lead time management, and the systems that make it visible
• Demand planning - building a credible forward view of volume that connects commercial pipeline to production capacity
• Inventory management, supply chain oversight, and purchasing - including international supplier relationships and early-warning systems for supply risk
• Shipping, dispatch, and fulfilment accuracy
• Workshop floor efficiency - working with the team to identify and remove bottlenecks without disrupting output
• Own the operational impact assessment for every new product launch - supply chain readiness, production capacity, quality control requirements, and lead time implications

Process Documentation

• Systematically document key processes, build sequences, and tribal knowledge currently held by skilled individuals
• Create build documentation that enables consistent quality at scale and protects the business against key person risk

Systems and Technology

• Lead the selection and implementation of our MRP system
• Own the operational tech stack - you do not have to build everything yourself, but you need to understand the problem well enough to specify the right solution and hold others accountable
• Use AI tools to improve operational decision-making, surfacing insights from our data and reducing manual work

What We Are Looking For

• 5+ years of experience with a meaningful chunk of that in manufacturing, automotive, or a closely adjacent industry
• Has operated at a senior level in a scaleup or fast-growth SME - you have built processes where none existed, not just maintained ones someone else designed
• Genuine COGS fluency - you have owned cost of goods, understand the levers, and know how to build visibility from scratch
• Quality-first mindset - you understand that in a premium product business quality and cost are not opposites, and you have never treated them as such
• Strategic range - you can move between a production scheduling problem and a channel strategy conversation without losing altitude on either
• Tech-savvy and AI-fluent - comfortable owning a systems implementation, intellectually curious about new tools, and able to use AI practically in your day-to-day work
• Strong people leader - able to get the best from a skilled, proud workshop team without micromanaging, and able to develop junior operations staff alongside them
• Comfortable with ambiguity - we are building the plane while flying it and you need to be energised by that, not unsettled