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 the right fit if you want * A pure HR, recruitment or executive-assistant position. * Immediate responsibility for strategy, sales growth or every department. * A large corporate environment with fully defined procedures. * To solve every problem personally rather than building reliable ownership around the team.
What we offer * A long-term remote contractor engagement intended to be the person’s principal full-time commitment. * GBP £1650-1850 (approximately USD 2,200–2,500) net monthly service fee, with flexibility for exceptional evidence. * Direct access to the founder and genuine influence over the operating system. * An established, experienced team rather than a blank sheet or turnaround crisis. * Existing documentation and processes upon which to build. * An engagement designed around long-term trust and responsibility. * Potential, once the core mandate works, to apply the system to related companies or new ventures.
Availability and planned unavailability
The work requires reliable availability during normal UK business hours for scheduled collaboration, timely decisions and live coordination. Much of the documentation, analysis and project work can be organised flexibly, provided agreed outputs, deadlines and service needs are met.
Before you start, please let me know during your interview process about any dates you already expect to be unavailable during your first three months. This is simply for onboarding and workload planning — not a final deadline for all future time off. Plans can change, and you can notify us of additional or unexpected unavailability later under our agreement.
You do not need to write a traditional cover letter. Please send your CV and answer all eight questions below. We will prioritise applications that provide specific, evidence-based answers. * * Where are you currently based, what is your notice period, and when could you begin? * Can you provide reliable availability during normal UK business hours? * Is the advertised service-fee range workable for you? * How do you currently use spoken and written English professionally? * Process improvement — maximum 180 words Describe one people or operating process you inherited and substantially improved. State the original problem and scale, what you personally changed, how you secured adoption, the measurable result, and anything that remained imperfect. * Recruitment ownership — maximum 180 words Describe one role or hiring campaign you personally owned from role definition through to offer. Include the role type, approximate candidate volumes and stages, time to hire, the decisions that were personally yours, and any evidence of whether the hire succeeded after joining. * Continuity and coverage — maximum 150 words Describe a holiday, absence, turnover or single-person-dependency risk you personally identified and addressed. What did you put in place, how was it tested, and what happened when the normal owner was unavailable? * Prioritisation scenario — maximum 150 words It is Monday morning. A critical support vacancy is four weeks overdue, two team members have overlapping leave next week, and the team says three important procedures are outdated. The founder is unavailable until 15:00 and wants a decision-focused update at 16:00. What would you establish first, what would you do or delegate today, what would require founder approval, and what would your update contain?
Please answer all eight questions. For questions 5–7, use one specific example and clearly distinguish what you personally did from what the wider team did.
