Sr. Operations Manager

Senior Operations Manager (Head of Operations)
Ideawise · Remote-first, Europe (CET)

Forge the support system an entire venture portfolio stands on.

About Ideawise
Most companies build a product. We build companies.
Ideawise is a venture builder: we fund, build and govern ventures from one shared machine — the operating system, service layer and AI infrastructure every new company inherits on day one instead of spending its first year rebuilding. We hold equity in what we build, and the machine already pays for itself: an eight-figure-revenue, profitable portfolio, years in production. ~150 people. Four legal entities. Hubs in Berlin, Barcelona and Shanghai.
One more thing, because everyone claims it and almost nobody has it: our leadership function runs on an AI-native operating layer in production — planning, delivery tracking and decisions run through agents, today. You wouldn't build the case for AI-native operations here. You'd inherit it, and operate at the leverage it gives you.

The role
This is not a process role. It's a build role — and what you build is the thing every venture here stands on.
A company built inside Ideawise doesn't spend its first year standing up finance, legal, hiring, data and infrastructure. It inherits all of that on day one — a support system already running, already staffed, already good. That system is what you forge: the engine that lets a brand-new venture move like a five-year-old company in its first month.
You take over the organization behind it: six service lines — People & Culture, Finance, Legal, Data Services, AI Platform, Systems Administration — roughly fifty people, each line led by an experienced operator, with the group's ventures as their clients.
The ambition: services strong enough to win on the open market — run as an internal one. A published catalogue. Real turnaround standards. Client satisfaction you can measure and defend. Not a cost center the ventures tolerate — a market they'd choose. The operating model is set at group level; making it real, across every venture, at quality, every day — that's yours.
You report directly to the COO, with full operational authority over the service organization. Most operators at this level run one company's operation. This one powers many — and every one we launch next.

What you'll own
Six service lines and their leads — commitments, delivery, dependencies, and capacity allocation across the portfolio. Ownership from day one.
The market mechanics — the catalogue, the standards, the satisfaction scores. They don't exist yet. You define them, publish them, and move them. The numbers everything else steers by will be yours from zero.
The operating cadence — built to run without heroics, and without you in every room.
The call — when two ventures want the same capacity in the same week, you decide. You don't broker.

What you'll bring
You've run a real operation through scale — real headcount, real cost base, real speed. Operations leadership at a high-growth technology company, or platform/portfolio operations at a venture capital firm, venture builder or studio — where you wanted to own the operation, not advise it.
You move numbers and can prove it — metrics you defined, owned and improved, and the systems you built to move them.
You lead senior people — the service leads are experienced operators. This is leadership among peers.
Automation is how you operate, not a topic you follow — a meaningful part of an operation you ran was automated under your ownership: specified, commissioned or built by you, accountable when it breaks. We work AI-natively; this is the bar.
You hold your ground with founders — a clear position, backed by evidence, and the relationship intact afterwards.

What we offer
Scope you won't find twice. The support system behind a venture portfolio — and the mandate to build its market from the ground up. What you forge here becomes the operating standard for every company we launch next.
A seat next to the machine's designers. Direct line to group executive leadership, and a voice in the operating model you execute.
AI-native for real. Production agents, a live delivery cockpit, leverage most operators only read about.
Remote-first, Europe — CET hours, hubs in Berlin and Barcelona. Permanent, full-time. Start when you can.
Compensation discussed openly in the first conversation.

How to apply

• Send two things: your CV, and a cover letter written for us.

The letter is what we read first, and it is deliberately unconstrained — any form, any length, any medium. A letter. A memo. A teardown of how you'd run our service catalogue. A one-page operating plan. Conventional is permitted; it is rarely what gets remembered.

And we are not going to pretend about the tool on your desk. We work AI-natively, so use one. What you can get out of a model is a skill we hire for at this level — so treat this as the first place to show it rather than something to hide. We are not interested in whether a model helped. We are interested in what you were able to make it do.

If you want a starting point, this is what we're actually curious about:
The most complex operation you ever took over: your approach, and what failed anyway.
An operational metric you moved: baseline, intervention, result.
A part of your operation that ran on automation: what it did, who built it, what happened when it broke.
Four portfolio companies, one central team, capacity for two priorities. Your allocation.
Something you built and later killed — and how you knew it was time.

https://hiring-agent-sand.vercel.app/v2/apply/senior-ops-manager

We hire on capability — regardless of nationality, gender, age, disability, parental or caring responsibilities, or background. Tell us if you need any adjustment to the process.