Head of Operations

About YourStride

YourStride is on a mission to help people age without limits. Our discreet smartwatch gets emergency help at the push of a button, anywhere in the UK, giving people the freedom to be more sociable, go anywhere, and give their families peace of mind. In an emergency our experienced 24/7 monitoring team speaks to the wearer through the watch, works out what has happened and arranges the right help, whether that’s the emergency services, family or simply reassurance. The watch also tracks steps and vitals to help people stay active.

YourStride was founded by Adi and Ewan, serial entrepreneurs who were part of Entrepreneur First’s first cohort. They’ve spent nearly 15 years in technology for social good, winning multiple awards along the way, including a place in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for their work improving older people’s lives. They saw first-hand how much people disliked red button alarms, which feel stigmatising and only work at home. So they ran workshops and interviews across the UK with older people, their families, carers and healthcare professionals, sat in on calls in monitoring centres and installed the old kit themselves. Two million people in the UK use personal alarms, and for over 30 years there had been no real alternative. The result was YourStride: a genuine, affordable alternative that people are proud to wear.

Since launching in 2019, we’ve become the highest-rated alarm service in the UK and largest provider of go anywhere alarms, saving a life every 12 hours. Today we support tens of thousands of people and continue to grow rapidly. Ultimately, we’re working to close the gap between how long people live and how long they live well. We’re a small, close-knit team based in London and across the UK.

Our culture and what we value

• Evidence over opinion. We test, measure what matters, and decide from the data. Good ideas win when they stand up to the numbers.
• High standards and output. The people who rely on us deserve our best work, so the bar is high and as a small team we get a lot done.
• Trusted to use our judgement. Processes are there to support our decisions, not replace them.
• We’re here to make a difference. We’re a social enterprise helping older people live independently for longer. That shapes how we treat customers: as people, not numbers.
• Always improving. We ask for specific feedback, act on it, and hold our service, our processes and our own work to the same standard.

The role

You’ll be our first operations hire, reporting to a founder, in a service where getting it right means saving someone’s life. You’ll own how YourStride runs: our service delivery, people and the projects that help us scale. You’ll work closely with both our founders and report to Adi.

It’s a broad role. In a single day you might review a partner’s performance, assess a new risk and decide how we manage it, or build the model for how the team should grow.

You’ll be a hands-on individual contributor. You’ll shape how we operate, not inherit someone else’s playbook, and as we grow you’ll decide what operations needs next. There’s real scope for the role to grow with you, including building and leading your own team.

What you will own

Service quality and risk management (40%)

You’ll make sure we deliver exceptional service that helps older people stay safe and independent. We’re there for people in emergencies, so getting things right is essential. You’ll understand our risks and manage them well, which means being across the details of our partners, our cases and our processes, and always looking for ways to make them better.

• Hold our operational delivery partners to the high standards our customers rely on: review their performance against contractual targets, dig into individual incidents, and turn what you find into improvements that reduce risk and improve quality.
• Understand our risks, manage them well, and spot new risks before they affect us, from network changes and new regulation to data protection, product safety and the claims we make in our marketing.
• Make sure we're ready if a critical part of our service fails, with continuity plans that limit the impact and get us back up quickly.
• If something goes wrong, lead the initial response and make sure we learn from it.
• Be the team's go-to for complex customer situations, bringing attention to detail and sound judgement.

People and team planning (35%)

You’ll make sure YourStride stays a great place to work as we grow, run the people side of the business, and plan how the team grows.

• Design how we work together, from onboarding new starters to weekly updates and daily standups, and adapt it as the team grows.
• Keep a pulse on how people are feeling, and own recognition and development.
• Manage HR casework end to end with our external HR advisers.
• Keep our role descriptions and performance measures up to date as roles change, and make sure reviews happen on schedule.
• Own our policies and HR system.
• Make sure hiring runs smoothly with the relevant team lead, from first interview to first day.
• Keep our team forecast up to date as we grow, design how teams are structured, and recommend where the next hires should be.

Building for scale (25%)

YourStride is growing quickly. This part of the role is deliberately open. You’ll find the places where we can run better and take them on as projects. For example:

• Working with our fulfilment team so the journey from order to doorstep keeps up as volumes grow, with the hands-on parts needing less of us.
• Replacing tools and systems we've outgrown, and the manual workarounds that have grown up around them.
• Formalising processes that live in one person's head, so they survive holidays, illness and growth.
• Identifying patterns in what keeps coming up across the team, fixing them at the root so the same question doesn't come up twice.
• Owning the questions nobody owns yet: scope them, do the work, and recommend an answer.

Who you are

You'll need:

• Real operational ownership. You've owned operations in a small, growing business or run a substantial operational area in a larger one. You’re hands-on when it’s needed and you can point to things that work better because of you.
• A habit of improving things. You go looking for what could be better, and you ask for feedback on your own work.
• Sound judgement and an eye for risk. You can consider a complex issue, understand what could go wrong and come to the right response.
• A track record of holding people to account. You've held external partners or internal teams to clear standards and performance measures, and changed how they perform.
• Comfort with numbers. You can build a forecast or model from messy data, you decide from the evidence, and you change your mind when the numbers say so.
• People experience. You've handled people matters end to end, including the conversations nobody enjoys.
• Care about the mission. You want your work to help older people live independently for longer.

What we offer

• £80,000 to £100,000, depending on experience.
• Real ownership, direct access to the founders, and decisions made in days, not quarters.
• Remote-first: we aim to get together at offices in London once a week.
• 30 days’ holiday, including bank holidays.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Salary sacrifice pension with our National Insurance savings added to your pot.
• Free, confidential mental health support through our employee assistance programme, including 24/7 counselling.
• Your kit: MacBook Air, keyboard, mouse and laptop stand.
• Work that matters to older people and their families, every day.

How we hire

We move quickly and we’ll tell you where you stand at every step. There are five stages, over about four weeks:

1. A 30-minute call with Adi.
2. An in-depth interview with both founders, lasting two to three hours. We’ll walk through your career role by role: what you were brought in to do, what you achieved and what you learned along the way.
3. A one-hour video session with both founders, where you’ll read a few realistic scenarios and then talk us through how you’d handle them.
4. Time with the team and with both founders, so we can all get to know each other properly.
5. References, including former managers.

How to apply

Apply with your CV and a cover letter. You’ll need to be eligible to work in the UK. More details at https://careers.yourstride.com.

Inclusion and adjustments

We’re an equal opportunity employer. We don’t discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic, including age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity.

We welcome applications from people returning after a career break. If you need adjustments at any stage of the process, tell us and we’ll work with you to put reasonable adjustments in place.