Operations Manager

NEW BRANDS OPERATIONS MANAGER
DEPARTMENT: New Brands
💷 £45k-55k (Bonus + Share Options)
🚆HYBRID - London Based (Victoria Station) 4 days a week in Office, 1 day WFH
WHO ARE WE?
#14 - Fastest Growing UK Tech Company (Sunday Times)
#65 - Fastest Growing UK&I Company (Sifted)
#77 - Fastest Growing Europe Company (Sifted)

Sessions is building the operating model for the future of restaurants, giving consumers instant access to the brands they love, wherever they live.

The Sessions distribution engine runs through 450+ delivery kitchens and 16 high street restaurants across the UK.

Founded in 2020 and led by ex-Deliveroo MD Dan Warne, Sessions has grown 7x in three years. Our platform has processed over 5 million orders and reaches 60% of the UK population. Our team brings experience from Deliveroo, Amazon, BrewDog, and Gousto.

We scale brands at a pace that redefines what's possible in food. Examples include Miko's Gyros, which went from launch to 100+ live sites in under two months and SoBe Burger, which is live in over 200 delivery locations and has opened 17 physical high street stores.

🏃‍♂️ We are Agile - Thrive in fast-pace. We sprint, adapt, and learn.
🌍 We are Ambitious - Contribute to something big. Watch your career grow bigger.
🤪 We are Fun - High performance, high fives. Join a team you'll love.
🤖We are Data-Driven - Turn insights into action. We lead with evidence.
💡We have Initiative - Anticipate problems. Drive the solution.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

As our New Brands Operations Manager, you’ll own the process that decides which brands earn a permanent place in the Sessions network — the single biggest point of leverage in how well New Brands scales.

The team is in growth mode, aiming to increase the volume of brands we work with from 12 a year to 20. As volume increases, the key skill is understanding trade-offs — knowing where to spend time versus not, and what to prioritise.

You’ll work cross-functionally across Studio, Supply Chain and Growth, making sure we’re working towards outcomes rather than just tasks. You’ll also line manage our Validation Trainer, who leads the majority of on-site training and floor management for validation launches. It’s a hands-on role: structured enough to scale, detailed enough to get into host kitchens when needed.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Host Operators Support and Relationship Management:

• Identify the right sites for validation and ensure kitchens are launch-ready.

• Provide support at escalation level for host sites or in the absence of the New Brand Trainer who will be the primary point of contact day to day.

• Conduct regular site visits to assess performance and provide feedback.

• Build and maintain strong relationships with Brand Founders as well as delivery platforms.

• Work closely with various internal teams at Sessions to give the brands the best possible chance of succeeding within the validation period.

Programme and Project Management:

• Own the end-to-end validation process, driving it against clear timelines and holding pace as volumes increase.

• Own KPI monitoring and reporting across validation, and run the review process that decides what interventions are needed and which brands progress.

• Build and maintain scalable systems, templates and playbooks so the process holds up as volume grows toward c.20 brands a year.

• Prioritise across the full portfolio of brands in validation, deciding where time and resource should be spent as volumes increase, and why.

• Maintain live visibility of the validation pipeline, so issues within any brand's validation are caught and diagnosed quickly rather than surfacing late.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Work and collaborate with Studio, Supply Chain and Growth so validation's needs are reflected in their planning.

• Understand constraints and capacity within each team, and where resource is best spent and which brands are prioritised.

• Draw on the expertise other teams bring, while still owning the decisions and driving validation towards clear outcomes.

• Once a brand has been validated, coordinate with the relevant downstream teams — including UKI — to set both the brand and those teams up for success.

Continuous Improvement & Systematic Learning:

• Take a proactive, hypothesis-led approach to validation: capture insight from each brand's pre- and post-validation stages and apply it earlier in the next one, so problems are caught before a brand goes live rather than after.

• Draw on insight from the broader Sessions estate — brands already live and scaling — to identify where validation itself can improve.

• Build AI-enabled reporting tools that turn validation data into structured, comparable analysis, so each brand's learnings become part of a growing, repeatable body of knowledge rather than one-off analysis.

People Management & Leadership:

• Directly manage and line-lead the New Brands Trainer, setting clear operational priorities and managing workload across brand rollouts.

• Support ongoing professional development, career growth, and skills enhancement for direct reports.

• Lead recruitment and onboarding efforts as team requirements scale.

• Oversee performance management and evaluation to maintain high standards of execution across validation sites.

DESIRED SKILLS, EXPERIENCE & QUALITIES:

• Process Ownership: highly organised, with a strength in process and procedure — builds and continuously improves repeatable systems, not just follows them.

• Cross-Functional Influence: delivers through teams that don't report to them.

• People Management: has line-managed and developed a direct report.

• Hands-On: comfortable in the operational detail, not just directing from above.

• Data and Hypothesis-Led: uses data and hypotheses to proactively spot issues before they surface, blending on-the-ground insight with what the data is showing to drive decision-making.

• Sector Experience: food, hospitality or QSR background valuable as context — ideally kitchen-to-corporate or hospitality experience.

• Strong communicator, able to build rapport and resolve conflict.

• Willing to travel to host sites; based in the London office.

• Ambitious, with a drive to join a fast-paced, high-growth company.

• Delivery platform experience preferred but not essential.

• Charismatic and energetic, with a passion for food.

• Expert English and right to work in the UK.

 BENEFITS & PERKS
💷Financial
Share Options - Receive an amount of share options for Sessions Market Ltd.
Pay day on demand - Access to pay in advance whenever needed
Expense card - Company Card
Finance Platform - Access to 'Mintago', Financial Wellbeing Platform

🌴Social, Mental & Physical Wellbeing:
Hybrid Working - up to 2 days working remotely per week
Holidays - 25 days + bank holidays + Birthday Off
Healthcare - Vitality PMI + Healthcare Cash Plan scheme
Employee Assistance Programme - Support for mental health and legal services
Socials - Monthly socials

Sessions are a living wage and equal opportunity employer.
all applicants are reviewed 'anonymously' where only work experience and education will be available for the hiring manager to view - all applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.