Senior Strategy & Ops Manager - New Verticles

About us

We are champions of rail, inspired to build a greener, more sustainable future of travel. Trainline enables millions of travellers to find and book the best value tickets across carriers, fares, and journey options through our highly rated mobile app, website, and B2B partner channels. 

Great journeys start with Trainline 🚄 

Now Europe’s number 1 downloaded rail app, with over 135 million monthly visits and £6.3 billion in annual ticket sales, we collaborate with 270+ rail and coach companies in over 40 countries. We want to create a world where travel is as simple, seamless, eco-friendly and affordable as it should be. 

Today, we're a FTSE 250 company driven by our incredible team of over 1,000 Trainliners from 50+ nationalities, based across London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Edinburgh and Madrid. With our focus on growth in the UK and Europe, now is the perfect time to join us on this high-speed journey. 

Introducing the Trainline New Verticals Team 👋

New Verticals is one of Trainline's largest growth bets, building and scaling our Hotels and Car Hire businesses. The team is moving fast: standing up new partnerships, launching new product experiences, and setting the operating model that will grow this into a meaningful part of Trainline over the next few years. We're looking for a Senior Manager to be the strategic and operational backbone of this build, working directly with the Head of New Verticals and cross-functional stakeholders to turn ambition into a disciplined, well-run programme.

This is a high-visibility role for someone comfortable structuring a loosely defined problem, bringing a point of view to the table, and combining strong execution with a keen eye for detail. You'll co-create strategy alongside Product, Commercial and Legal leads, working closely with multiple cross-functional teams to keep complex, multi-party launches on track, translate strategy into executable plans, and ensure nothing important falls through the cracks.

In this role as the Senior Manager, Strategy & Operations, you will...🚄

· Shape the New Verticals strategy across Hotels and Cars, translating it into structured roadmaps, milestones and success metrics

· Bring structured thinking to ambiguous, fast-evolving problems and anticipate risks and dependencies before they become blockers

· Own the end-to-end programme across major New Verticals initiatives, including new product launches and feature rollouts

· Track dependencies, risks and decisions across cross-functional partners, driving them to resolution

· Build and run the governance rhythm for the New Verticals programme, ensuring the right people have the right information at the right time

· Own leadership reporting, including performance updates, business reviews and steering committee materials, synthesising complex detail into clear, decision-ready narratives

· Act as a trusted connective layer between New Verticals and partners including Legal, Compliance, Finance, Product, Design and Commercial

· Build strong relationships with senior stakeholders, influencing without formal authority and getting ahead of cross-team friction

We'd love to hear from you if you have...🔍

· Strong programme or project management experience, ideally including complex, multi-stakeholder launches

· A structured, analytical approach, comfortable building plans, frameworks and reporting from scratch

· Executive presence and communication range, equally credible presenting to a steering committee or debating in a working session

· Strong stakeholder management skills, with the credibility to work confidently with and influence senior leaders

· A bias to action, spotting what needs to happen and driving it rather than waiting to be told

· Comfort with ambiguity, energised by building things from the ground up rather than following an existing playbook

· Experience in hotels, travel or the broader travel-tech/OTA space is helpful but not required; what matters most is the operating rigour, judgement and strategic instinct you bring

What this role offers you...
This is about as close as you'll get to setting up and running your own business:

· Seat at the table early. Direct exposure to senior leadership and C-suite as you help shape a business that's still being written, not one you're inheriting

· The full arc of business building, from strategy through to launch and beyond, with a real P&L to show for it, backed by the resources and stability of an established, publicly listed company

· Steep learning curve. You'll pick up foundational skills across Strategy, Product, Commercial, Ops and more

· Launchpad for what's next. New Verticals has genuinely aggressive growth ambitions across new lines of business, and you'll be positioned to grow with it.

· Great team and work culture. Genuinely friendly people who'll always have your back!

More information:

Enjoy fantastic perks like private healthcare & dental insurance, a generous work from abroad policy, 2-for-1 share purchase plans, an EV Scheme to further reduce carbon emissions, extra festive time off, and excellent family-friendly benefits. 

We prioritise career growth with clear career paths, transparent pay bands, personal learning budgets, and regular learning days. Jump on board and supercharge your career from day one! 

We're operating a hybrid model and ask that Trainliners work from the office a minimum of 60% of their time over a 12-week period. We also have a 28-day Work from Abroad policy.

Our values represent the things that matter most to us and what we live and breathe everyday, in everything we do: 

• 💭 Think Big - We're building the future of rail 

• ✔️ Own It - We focus on every customer, partner and journey 

• 🤝  Travel Together - We're one team 

• ♻️ Do Good - We make a positive impact 

We know that having a diverse team makes us better and helps us succeed. And we mean all forms of diversity - gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationality and diversity of thought. That's why we're committed to creating inclusive places to work, where everyone belongs and differences are valued and celebrated.

Interested in finding out more about what it's like to work at Trainline? Why not check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram and Glassdoor!