Principal Strategy & Business Operations Manager

Job Description

About us

GoCardless’ vision is to build a global connected payments network, making payments simpler on the internet no matter what country you’re in or what software you’re using.

Today, we help over 50,000 businesses across the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the North America to collect payments, and we’re growing fast. We have offices in the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and the US. Our strategic partnerships with market-leading platforms such as Zuora, Xero and Chargebee have been critical to our global success and have allowed us to work with a huge range of organisations: small gyms and scout groups use us to reduce admin; fast growing companies like Funding Circle use us to power their growth; established institutions like The Guardian use us to dramatically reduce failure rates.

Our HQ is in London and we’re backed by some of the world’s leading investors including Balderton Capital, Accel Partners, Notion Capital, Passion Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adams Street Partners, GV and Y Combinator.

The Business Operations & Strategy team

The mission of the Business Operations and Strategy team is to help GoCardless make high-quality decisions and to translate these decisions into action. We report into the COO.

As a team, our work tends to be project-based and wide-ranging. Recent priorities have included designing and implementing a new go-to-market org structure, defining our 3-year strategy, and launching a new pricing model for our merchants (among many other projects). In each case, the team has owned the analysis and then worked closely with key stakeholders (CEO & Management) to form recommendations as well as to kick off and oversee the delivery cross-functionally.

The Business Operations and Strategy team is based in our London HQ.

The role

As a Principal Strategy & Business Operations Manager, you will report into the VP of Business Operations and Strategy, and will be at the most senior level within the team. You will work closely with the CEO, COO, and other members of the Exec team to drive some of GoCardless’ most critical decisions and deliver strategic initiatives in a fast and pragmatic way. On large projects, you will coach more junior members of the team to whom you will be able to delegate discrete pieces of work.

On a day-to-day basis, your role will include:

• Running part of the operating cadence of the business, including weekly executive meetings, quarterly board updates, strategy and delivery reviews, etc.
• Partnering with nearly all functions within GC to enable the delivery of strategic company objectives.
• In some cases, you will own the delivery of specific programs (e.g. when those programs are particularly cross-functional or complex), and will be defining scope, project plans and workstreams, assembling project teams, and driving execution cross-functionally.
• Partnering with specific functions within GC to help them solve complex, strategic questions specific to their area in an internal consulting capacity.
• On an annual basis, working closely with the exec team to refresh our 3-year strategy.
• Where GC identifies new growth opportunities (e.g. new markets), leading the evaluation from a strategic, financial, and operational point of view and where needed driving the execution to capture those opportunities.

What we are looking for

• 6-7 years at a top-tier consulting firm, investment bank, or private equity firm
• Experience delivering large-scale strategic or transformational projects
• Proven ability to manage stakeholders across multiple levels, functions, and geographies; ease in dealing with senior stakeholders
• Outstanding track record of professional and academic achievement
• Highly motivated self-starter
• Strong verbal and written communication
• Strong team player

Our team come from a variety of backgrounds and we welcome diversity – if you're unsure, please apply.