Head of Operations

Head of Operations Wave Group Competitive Basic Salary + Bonus

Reports to:

COO. A path to Chief of Staff. Occasional international travel. About Wave Group

Wave Global Group is a tech-enabled professional services business with two service engines and a product arm that incubates and owns its software and data assets. Services, software, and data compounding together.

• Wave Talent. UK recruitment and staffing. Permanent and contract technology and digital professionals for VC-backed and enterprise clients. The original and largest revenue engine.
• Wave Works. SoW-based enterprise consultancy. Multi-workstream technology programmes at seven-figure scale. The growth engine shifting Wave's revenue mix from services to programmes.
• Wave Labs. The group's product and technology arm. Labs incubated and owns the group's two proprietary assets:
• Wave Mind
  . Self-serve AI hiring platform, built on Wave Talent's proprietary candidate universe. A quality-controlled alternative to pure AI hiring tools. The ARR engine.
• Mothership. Internal data lake with LLM copilot capability. Powers Iron Man Suits, candidate matching, financial reporting, and group intelligence. The infrastructure that compounds every year the group exists.

Wave is scaling across the UK, US, and UAE and building toward a meaningful exit. Every role is designed to compound against that trajectory.

This is the operational layer directly beneath the COO. You own the cross-functional projects and infrastructure that sit above associate level but below director level. You protect the founders' time by making sure things land. You're the first port of call for operational problems with no clear owner, and the person who turns the founders' vision into executed reality. You work on a project basis, flexing to whatever matters most that week.

You won't be a specialist in any one function. Instead, you're great at most things and fixated on what unblocks growth: the operational connective tissue across sales, the non-sales functions (finance, commercial, people, and marketing), and Labs. A core part of the job is making those three sides work as one, and keeping Labs connected to the rest of the business rather than running as an island.

You won't have every answer, but you're sharp and resourceful enough to find it through research, advisors, suppliers and the team, then execute.

The role spans six areas. Each sets out what you own and how we'll know it's working.

The operational side of opening and running our UAE and US entities. Entity setup, visas and relocation, banking and commercial infrastructure, and the advisors and suppliers who deliver it. You're the escalation point for international office matters as we go live in new markets, and you keep the founders out of the detail.

Success looks like:

• New entities go live on or ahead of plan, with the right infrastructure from day one.
• Visa, relocation and residency processes run to a clear timeline, not deadline to deadline.
• Advisors and suppliers are held to their commitments. The founders operate across markets without chasing paperwork.

The systems the business runs on. You build and maintain the dashboards and reporting leadership relies on. You own the SOPs and documentation around our tooling, so nothing depends on one person's memory. You won't need to be an engineer, but you'll need to build things and get hands-on with tools and AI.

Success looks like:

• Leadership has live, trusted dashboards, not ad hoc spreadsheets rebuilt each time.
• Core tools have clear, current SOPs. Onboarding onto our systems is fast and self-serve.
• Manual, repetitive work gets automated rather than absorbed by headcount. When a process breaks, there's documentation and a named owner: you.

The connective tissue across all three sides of the group. You sit across sales, the non-sales functions (finance, commercial, people, marketing) and Labs, spot where things fall between them, and close the gaps. Labs matters most here. It's building proprietary product at pace and can't run as an island, so you keep the operational, finance and commercial plumbing between Labs and the group connected.

Success looks like:

• Sales, non-sales and Labs run as one engine, not three silos. Items that used to stall now move.
• Labs gets the operational, finance and commercial support it needs without the Director chasing the group. Handovers between functions are clean.
• Leadership decisions are backed by clear data you've pulled together across all three. Issues are surfaced and resolved before they reach the founders.

Supporting the Group Strategy Director as an extension of their work. You coordinate across the group to unblock bottlenecks and get the business investor and growth ready. You pull together the materials and data a raise or transaction…