PEOPLE & OPERATIONS MANAGER
REMOTE · FULL-TIME · LONG-TERM CONTRACTOR £1,650—£1,850 net monthly · UK-hours overlap · Advanced English
This is not a conventional HR position.
Your mission is to make a capable, well-trained operation more resilient: clear ownership, reliable backup coverage, repeatable recruitment, tested documentation and early visibility of operational risk.
Bike Bubl is a 10-year-old London service business built around cargo bikes and operational field teams. Our remote team includes separate sales and customer-service functions, alongside cleaning leadership, software, repair and maintenance, and specialist external partners.
A recent unexpected leadership transition accelerated our succession plans. The operation is stable and the team is experienced. We are now looking for someone who can understand what already works, strengthen it and build a repeatable system around it.
Your first task will be to listen before redesigning: speak with the team, examine how work genuinely happens and identify the most important gaps, dependencies and risks.
Your initial assignment
You will start by listening to our experienced team
You will speak individually with team members, review existing handbooks and workflows, understand how work is actually performed and identify the important gaps, dependencies and risks.
You will then bring clear, prioritised findings to the founder: what should be protected, what should be improved, what can wait and what decisions are required. Once agreed, you will help implement the resulting systems.
What you will own
Recruitment of support team members from role definition through to offer.
Recruitment templates, candidate records and hiring analytics.
Holiday, absence, staffing and peak-period coverage planning.
Cleaner-recruitment support alongside relevant functional leads.
Onboarding, engagement-appropriate initial review or employee probation, offboarding and role-transition processes.
Performance tracking and associated administrative support.
Cross-training, backup ownership and continuity planning.
Audit and improvement of existing operating documentation.
Clear SOPs, checklists and training material for critical processes.
Concise weekly and monthly people-and-operations reporting.
Early identification of risk, accompanied by practical options.
Operating governance and continuity for critical external agencies and contractors, including scope, access, reporting, handover and replacement readiness.
What success looks like within six months
Every critical function has a clearly identified owner, backup and emergency route.
Holiday and peak coverage can be planned without last-minute founder intervention.
Support recruitment follows a repeatable, measured process.
Important documentation reflects how work genuinely happens and has been tested by its users.
Operational risks, performance concerns and hiring needs become visible early.
The founder receives short, decision-focused reports instead of investigating operations personally.
The company is less vulnerable to the unexpected departure or absence of any one person.
Critical external relationships are documented and can survive the loss of an agency contact or provider.
This is probably a strong fit if you
Have built practical people or operating systems in a smaller, fast-moving organisation.
Have personally owned recruitment and can explain what improved because of your work.
Enjoy interviewing team members and turning tacit knowledge into repeatable processes.
Can work with detail without losing sight of business priorities.
Use data to make decisions but do not create reporting for its own sake.
Communicate difficult information calmly and early.
Are comfortable bringing recommendations to a founder who retains strategy and budget responsibility.
Want a long-term role whose scope can grow after the core operation is secure.
Speak and write advanced English.
This is probably not th
