Head of Operations UK&I in London

• Reports to: GM UKI
• About First Table

At First Table, our vision is simple: to be the first place diners go to book a table.

Proudly established in Queenstown, New Zealand, where our head office is based, we've been leading the charge in the hospitality tech industry for over a decade, with operations spanning New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.

First Table now offers our great dining experiences at amazing restaurants across the UK.

Following the recent city launches in Bournemouth, Leicester, Norwich, and Southampton, we are doubling down on building a strong presence and connected team across the UK.

First Table is a dining discovery platform that connects diners to restaurants through their love of food.

Through our clever tech, we help restaurants get their night off to a great start and give diners a compelling reason to try somewhere new.

It's a win-win situation.

From early bird offers to last table reservations, we make discovering and booking great dining experiences fast, easy, and rewarding.

At the heart of everything we do are our values: Grow Together, Win-Win-Win, and Own It.

These guide how we show up for each other, our restaurant partners, and our diners, and they're a big part of what makes First Table a great place to work.

The Role

• The UKI business has ambitious goals focused on market depth and efficiency:
• Market Deepening: Growth will primarily come from increasing restaurant density, improving coverage quality, and maximizing current markets rather than launching new ones.
• Future Expansion: International expansion remains a potential lever further down the line.
• The Operating System: Success requires durable cadences, data infrastructure, playbooks, territory design, and decision frameworks that enable a lean field team to scale.

As Head of Operations, you will build and own this operating system, reporting directly to the GM UKI as their operational counterpart.

While the GM sets direction and owns commercial outcomes, you make the machine run and scale.

Your core remit is UKI, but the frameworks you build will serve as the reference model for First Table's other international markets, involving collaboration with global leaders to adapt and share best practices.

This is a builder's role where you will turn early foundations—such as territory analytics, benchmarking models, and initial dashboarding—into durable, self-serve infrastructure that the whole UK&I business runs on.

• What You'll Own
• The UKI operating cadence.

Operationalise the rhythm of the business: weekly trading reviews, monthly territory deep-dives, quarterly planning.

Make sure every meeting has the right data in front of it and every decision has an owner and a follow-through mechanism.

• Data and reporting infrastructure.

Own our analytics stack (Metabase and surrounding tooling) as a product for UK&I.

Build the dashboards, metric definitions, and automated reporting that give BDMs, Cluster Managers, and leadership a single version of the truth, and remove the manual exports and spreadsheet work that currently absorb team time.

• Ad hoc analysis and reporting.

When the GM, the global leadership team, or a partner needs a number, a market read, or a business case, you turn it round quickly and accurately.

Where a question keeps coming back, you productise the answer into a dashboard rather than rebuilding it each time.

• Field team productivity.

Our scarcest resource is BDM attention, not market opportunity.

You'll own the frameworks that allocate it well: territory design and book-size management, capacity planning, the BDM/Cluster Manager playbook, onboarding and ramp programmes, and the tooling that removes friction from the field team's day.

• Sales operations.

Own the commercial engine room: CRM support, pipeline and forecast discipline, target tracking and commission mechanics, and the reporting that tells us which activity actually converts.

You'll make sure the numbers the team is measured on are trusted and the tools they use daily work properly.

• Project and programme management for new launches.

Run the launch process for new product and commercial initiatives in UKI: reservation system integrations, partnership rollouts, pricing and packaging changes, and new features that need field team adoption.

You'll own the plan, the dependencies, the cross-team coordination with Product, Marketing, and the global business, the go-live readiness of the field team, and the post-launch measurement that tells us whether it worked.

• Market deepening.

Own the analytics behind where the biggest gaps sit in our existing cities: benchmark density per market, the value of closing each gap, and how that work gets prioritised and allocated across the field team.

When new market launches do come onto the agenda, you'll own the viability analysis and the trade-off against deepening plays, priced in the same terms.

• Process and playbook design.

Codify how we do things: restaurant acquisition, onboarding, account health management, win-back.

Quality shouldn't depend on tribal knowledge, and new hires should ramp in weeks, not quarters.

• International enablement.

As international expansion picks up, package the UKI operating system for other markets: work with GMs and market leads to adapt playbooks, dashboards, and planning frameworks to their context, and bring their better ideas back into the core.

About You

• 7+ years in operations, strategy, sales operations, or commercial operations roles, ideally in a marketplace, hospitality tech, high-growth consumer platform, or field-sales-led business
• You've built operating infrastructure from scratch: cadences, playbooks, planning processes, all AI enabled & automated where applicable
• Data-fluent.

Comfortable writing SQL, building dashboards (Metabase, Looker, or similar), and structuring analytical models in spreadsheets.

You don't need a data team to answer your own questions, though you know when to bring one in

• You can run a launch.

You've project-managed cross-functional rollouts to a deadline, held other teams to their commitments without formal authority over them, and made sure a frontline team was ready on day one

• You've done sales ops properly.

CRM ownership, pipeline hygiene, target and commission management, and the discipline to keep the numbers clean when it would be easier to let them slide

• You understand field teams.

Operations exist to make salespeople and account managers more effective, not to generate reporting for its own sake.

You've worked closely with distributed field or sales teams and know what earns their trust

• Commercially sharp. You think in unit economics, opportunity cost, and capacity constraints. You can put a number on a decision, not just describe it
• Low ego, high ownership.

You're comfortable working as the operational right hand to a GM: influencing without a large team, doing the work yourself where needed, and building the case for resources as the function proves its value

• Comfortable with ambiguity. You can hold a framework loosely and adapt it to markets with different maturity, density, and team structures

Nice to have: experience in restaurant tech, bookings/reservations platforms, or two-sided marketplaces; experience supporting or operating across multiple international markets; familiarity with lightweight automation (Apps Script, Zapier, APIs, Claude Co Work) to stitch tools together.

• Why This Role
• You'll define how an entire region operates, with a direct line to the GM and visibility across the global business
• Front row seat in a fast growing, global business
• The frameworks you build will directly determine field team priorities, hiring decisions, and how fast we grow
• High autonomy and ownership

First Table is an equal opportunity employer.

We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are happy to discuss flexible working arrangements and any reasonable adjustments needed for your application process and beyond.