Founder’s Associate - Strategy & Operations

Founder’s Associate - Strategy & Operations

London | Full-time | Early Career

£28,000-£35,000 + performance bonus | Notting Hill | 5 days in office

This isn’t a normal early-career role.

We’re looking for someone exceptionally bright, commercially curious and ambitious who wants to learn how a fast-growing business is actually built.

You might be considering consulting, banking, a graduate scheme, another startup or a strategy/operations role.

What you really want is responsibility early, exposure to difficult problems and the chance to learn directly from people building a business at scale.

You don’t need years of experience or to have already picked a specialism.

But you do need to be smart, high agency, low ego, hungry to learn and comfortable working things out without a perfect brief.

About Us

Simmer is a meal delivery service built on a simple idea: healthy food should taste extraordinary.

Founded by brothers Simmy and Jhai with £10 of ingredients, the business has grown into a c.£100m ARR consumer business serving tens of thousands of customers, and in both 2025 and 2026 was ranked #5 in The Sunday Times 100.

We’re not a startup finding its feet. We’re a profitable, bootstrapped business with serious momentum, still fully founder-led and with no private equity or corporate layers.

That matters because the founders still run the company, set the standard and are present in the work.

We’ve scaled with a deliberately lean team. That isn’t a constraint; it’s a philosophy.

People here get unusually close to the work, the decisions and the problems that shape the business. If you prove you can handle more responsibility, you’ll get more.

We’re proud of what we’ve built so far, but much more interested in what comes next.

The role

You’ll work closely with the founders and leadership team on some of the highest-priority problems across Simmer.

For your first 3-6 months, we deliberately won’t put you in a box.

• fixing an operational problem
• analysing customer or commercial data and turning it into a recommendation
• improving part of the customer journey
• helping launch a new product, market or initiative
• researching a commercial opportunity
• building a better process, system or AI/automation solution

The point isn’t to rotate you around for the sake of it.

It’s to expose you to different parts of the business quickly, work out where you’re strongest and give you increasing ownership from there.

Over time, you might specialise in Product, Data, Growth, Operations, Tech, People or another area.

Or you might continue as a high-performing generalist.

We don’t want to decide your ceiling before you’ve even started.

Who we’re looking for

You’re probably early in your career and have already shown that you can learn quickly, take ownership and operate above your level.

We care less about the exact route you’ve taken than evidence that you’re smart, commercially minded and able to get things done.

You’ll likely be:

• sharp and quick to understand new problems
• naturally commercial and comfortable with numbers
• proactive without needing constant direction
• curious about how the whole business works
• comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities
• low ego, happy to get into the detail and confident using AI and technology

Strong academics and/or evidence of achievement matter, but this isn’t about ticking boxes. We’re looking for clear potential and a track record of making things happen.

Why Simmer

You’ll work directly with founders and senior operators rather than several layers away from the decisions. You’ll see problems while they’re still messy, and you’ll be expected to form a view, challenge assumptions and make things happen.

Because Simmer has scaled with a deliberately lean team, you’ll get exposure to far more of the business than you would in a traditional graduate role, from strategy and operations to product, growth, data, AI and customer experience.

You’ll be joining a business that already has real scale and momentum, but is still early enough that there is a huge amount left to build. You won’t just be learning how the business works; you’ll be helping shape how it works.

And if you prove you’re excellent, we won’t make you wait three years for more responsibility because a graduate programme says you should.

Your progression will depend on how good you become and how much responsibility you can handle.

For the right person, it’s a chance to compress years of learning into a much shorter period while working on real problems with people who are actually building the business.