Overview

• Reporting to: Chief Financial Officer

• Visa sponsorship: Preference for UK national or current visa holder, but not a dealbreaker

• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work

• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by:  10th September 2025

• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible

Role

This role is key to unlocking Apolitical’s next phase of growth by translating ambition into action and building systems that support scale without slowing us down.

Apolitical is entering a new phase of growth, expanding our teams and bringing more structure and rigour to how we scale, sell and deliver. As part of this shift, we’re creating a Director of Operations role to take over the day-to-day running of Operations from our CFO.

This is a great opportunity for someone who thrives in a scale-up environment, bringing structure to complexity, enabling cross-functional delivery, and helping a mission-led organisation operate with greater commercial focus.

Team

You’ll report to the CFO and work closely with our CEO and leaders across Sales, Partnerships, and Product. This role is not currently part of the senior leadership team but interacts regularly with it and plays a key role in operational strategy. This role will have two to three direct reports.

Tasks and remit

You’ll work across teams to align commercial, delivery, and internal priorities with effective systems and clear decision-making. You’ll own key operational pillars to tighten execution and strengthen how we serve partners and public servants.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Running and evolving our OKR process and planning rituals

• Owning legal and contracting processes with governments, multilaterals, and corporates

• Maintaining the operational finance function (e.g. EMI/EIS, pricing reconciliation, P&L oversight)

• Strengthening our compliance function alongside our Compliance Lead

• Building scalable systems that enable execution without adding unnecessary complexity

You won’t be:

• Responsible for strategic finance, as that remains with our CFO

• Acting in a purely administrative capacity. This is a strategic, hands-on, and coaching-heavy role

Role expectations

We expect most team members to achieve the following milestones:

Within one month, you will…

• Understand our current planning, legal and financial ops systems

• Build strong working relationships with direct reports and peers

• Begin co-owning the OKR and planning process

Within three months, you will…

• Fully lead the company-wide OKR cycle

• Oversee and be ultimately accountable for legal, contracting and compliance

• Identify a major system or process to upgrade

Within six months, you will…

• Deliver a key operational improvement (e.g. legal process redesign, financial tooling)

• Elevate team performance through coaching and structured support

• Embed a company-wide calendar of planning, review, and accountability

About you

This is a great fit if you:

• Have operations experience at high-growth start-ups or scale-ups, across planning, legal, compliance, and financial ops

• Are a strategic executor — turning vision into action and leading OKRs across teams

• Have led complex legal or contracting negotiations, ideally with governments or large institutions

• Are fluent in operational finance and comfortable making judgement-heavy decisions alongside a CFO

• Use frameworks and heuristics to coach others through risk and ambiguity

• Are a first-principles thinker who breaks down complexity into its component parts and identifies levers for impact

• Have built and coached high-performing teams — you're known as a force multiplier

• Are a doer by default — ready to roll up your sleeves but skilled at stepping back to empower others

• Thrive on improving systems to enable faster, better outcomes

Let us know if you have…

• Worked with foundation, government, or multilateral partners

• Owned a People/HR function, especially around talent systems and culture-building

• Built or upgraded a compliance programme (regulatory or industry-specific)

Don’t meet every single expectation? We know that women and people of colour are less likely to apply unless they meet 100% of criteria. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align perfectly, please apply anyway — you may be the right candidate for this or another role.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application.  These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.