Business Operations and Strategy Lead

About the role

Onodrim is building Europe's largest defence and industrial platform. We acquire specialist manufacturers in critical defence and dual-use supply chains, then invest behind their growth with capital, technology and operating know-how.

A company that is buying manufacturers, launching products, entering new countries and growing its own team at the same time generates problems faster than any function can own them. The Business Operations and Strategy Lead is the person who takes those problems. You'll work across the whole business – with the leadership team, the deal team, engineering, finance, legal and the people running our portfolio companies – to get things done: design how something new should work, stand it up, unblock what is stuck, and use the company's own data to decide how it should run.

The work changes every few months. Examples of what you might take on:

• Designing the operating model for a new market or region launch
• Building workforce and capacity models to keep pace with rapid growth
• Negotiating a first-of-its-kind partnership
• Standing up an operational team for a new product line
• Using internal data to inform key decisions about how the company runs

This is not a strategy-slides job. You'll write the plan, then execute it, then hand over something that works to the people who will run it, and move on to the next problem.

What you'll do

• Take the problem nobody owns. Pick up the cross-functional questions that fall between teams – a new entity, a new process, a decision that has stalled – and drive them to a result.
• Design how new things work. Define the operating model for a new region, product line, function or partnership: who does what, how it is governed, what it costs, what has to be true for it to work.
• Stand it up. Turn the design into a running operation – hire or assign the people, set up the process and tools, run it through the first months, and hand it over.
• Unblock the organisation. Find where decisions, approvals, handoffs and tools slow the company down; fix them, and remove process rather than add it wherever possible.
• Build the models. Workforce and capacity plans, scenario models for growth and integration, unit economics for a new line – built from the company's own data and used to make real decisions.
• Negotiate and structure. Lead or support negotiations with partners, suppliers and counterparties where the arrangement has no template – and work with legal and finance to get it signed and working.
• Run the operating rhythm. Support the leadership team's planning and review cycle – objectives, metrics, business reviews – so the company knows how it is doing and decides quickly.
• Bring data to decisions. Pull together internal data from finance, operations, people and the portfolio companies into analyses the leadership team can act on, and make the data easier to get next time.
• Support integration. Take cross-functional workstreams in the integration of acquired companies – entity set-up, shared services, reporting – where no single function owns them.
• Document and hand over. Leave behind something that runs without you: a process, a playbook, a team with an owner.

Requirements

What you'll bring

• A degree in business, economics, engineering or a closely related discipline.
• 5+ years in roles where you made things happen across an organisation: business operations, chief of staff, strategy and operations at a scale-up, management consulting with real implementation, or operations leadership inside a growing company.
• A track record of standing something up from nothing – a team, a function, a process, an entity – and leaving it running.
• Strong analytical skills: you build the model yourself, in Excel or SQL, and present the one number that decides the question.
• Comfort with ambiguity: you have been handed a one-line brief and turned it into a plan and a result, more than once.
• The ability to work across functions and levels without formal authority – with engineers, finance, legal, plant managers and executives – and to get them to decide.
• Judgement about process: you know when a company needs more structure and when it needs less, and you err towards less.
• Clear, direct communication in English, written and spoken – a one-page memo over a thirty-page deck.
• Willingness to travel across Europe to portfolio companies, partners and our offices as the work requires.
• Right to work in the UK, Switzerland or the EU.

Nice to have

• We operate our business in English; knowledge of a European language other than English is beneficial.
• Experience in a PE-backed or acquisitive company, including post-merger integration workstreams.
• Exposure to manufacturing, defence or another industrial sector where operations are physical and regulated.
• Experience setting up operations in a new country – entity, payroll, compliance, local team – or launching a product line.
• Familiarity with modern data tooling (SQL, BI tools, data platforms) and with using LLM-based tools to get analysis done faster.
• Experience negotiating commercial or partnership agreements with legal and finance support.
• Time in a start-up or small team where you did whatever the company needed.
• Clearance in at least one of our operating countries.