Sortation Marketplace Operations Manager

Sortation Marketplace Operations Manager Relay is fundamentally reshaping how goods move in an online era. Backed by Europe’s largest-ever logistics Series A ($35M), led by deep-tech investors Plural (whose portfolio spans fusion energy and space exploration), Relay is scaling faster than 99.98% of venture-backed startups. We're assembling the most talent-dense team the logistics industry has ever seen Relay’s Mission is to free commerce from friction. Today, high delivery costs act as a hidden tax on e-commerce, quietly shaping what can be sold online and limiting who can participate. We envision a world where more goods move more freely between more people, making the online shopping experience seamless and accessible to everyone. THE TEAM • ~110 people, more than half in engineering, product and data • 45+ advanced degrees across computer science, mathematics and operations research • Thousands of data points captured, calculated, analysed and predicted for every single parcel we handle • An intellectually vibrant culture of first‑principles thinking, tight feedback loops and relentless experimentation The Opportunity Relay is hiring a Sortation Marketplace Lead, a senior systems builder sitting inside the Sortation Squad and reporting to our Director of Sort, Mobeen Warraich. The role owns the marketplace layer behind our sort network: the systems that make sure every shift at every sort site is staffed with the right Warehouse Operatives, and the wider sort-site labour around the at the right time, every night. This is not a floor role. Site managers and shift leads own on-the-day execution. Your job is to design and ship the marketplace systems that make their job progressively easier: from forecasting what each site needs, through sourcing and committing the supply, through to the recovery loops that kick in when the first plan fails. Engineering ships the code. The data analyst owns the analysis. You own the outcome — setting direction, sharpening the problem, and proving the system is actually working on the floor. You'll work alongside the squad's engineering team, led by Dragos Popa, and an embedded data analyst, as your closest day-to-day partners. As our sort footprint grows, so does the leverage of this role. As Sortation Marketplace Lead at Relay, you'll: - Own the Warehouse Operative supply system end-to-end. You are accountable for the system that fills every shift, at every site, on time - not the shift floor itself. - Own the full supply funnel as a system: demand forecasting > sourcing and pipeline > shift offering and pricing > commitment and confirmation > show-up > day-of recovery > post-shift feedback and retention. Every stage has a model, a metric, and a loop - and you are accountable for the design of all of them. - Be the operator at the centre of a three-way build - you, the squad's engineering team, and the squad's data analyst. Engineering ships the code. The analyst owns the analysis and the models. You own the outcome: sharpening the problem, setting the bar for what "good" looks like, pressure-testing designs in review, and owning the operational proof on the other side. Your output is measured in systems that run the network - not decks that describe them. - Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the squad's data analyst to turn forecasts into operational demand. You bring the operational direction - what the floor actually needs, at which site, in which window, and why - they bring the analytical rigour; together that translation becomes a system instead of a weekly meeting. - Design the recovery loops. When an operative no-shows, when a site runs hot, when supply collapses overnight - the system should react faster and better than a human on the phone. Own the allocation, re-offer, surge, and backup logic that turns a bad night into a rounding error. - Build the instrumentation. Define the first-principles metrics for workforce supply health - fill rate, show-up rate, time-to-fill, at ... (truncated, view full listing at source)