Head of Marketplace Operations
Flyp - Cape Town (hybrid)
Own and scale the operating engine behind Flyp's managed marketplace - where three to five estate agents compete simultaneously on a single listing, at sole-agency pricing. You'll own the seller journey end to end, lead the delivery team, and build the systems that let us run this at several times our current volume.
About flyp
The traditional property market is full of inefficiency. Sellers are tied to a single agent, a single buyer pool and a single Rightmove listing, with almost no visibility on whether their strategy is working.
Flyp changes that. Sellers instruct us, not an agent. We put multiple competing agents on the property at once, manage them actively, rotate out the ones who aren't delivering, and refresh the listing to keep it visible. The seller pays one fee, with no lock-in. We hold the relationship, the data and the decisions.
It works because we run it as a marketplace rather than an agency - but running a marketplace is materially harder than running an agency, and that difficulty is this role.
We've grown from a handful of instructions a month to consistently signing dozens, with 500+ properties live at any time, 100+ adding each month and thousands of agent partners. The next phase is a step change in volume, and it will only work if the operation gets better as it gets bigger.
The Role
You will sit at the centre of the marketplace operation - owning the seller journey, the performance of the delivery team, and the systems, playbooks and tooling that let all of it scale.
Your core focus is outcome quality: helping more sellers sell, helping them sell faster, keeping satisfaction high through a long and stressful journey, and increasing lifetime value by embedding relevant additional services into the experience.
Some specifics of what's in front of you:
- Properties priced within 5% of our average agent valuation sell around 75% of the time. Today, roughly a third of our launches hit that band.
- Marketplace partner engagement - when it works, it works great, but the agent engagement is too inconsistent and that needs fixing.
- Onboarding - from signature to live on the market — runs through AML, contracts, photography, access and agent instruction. It works, but it's held together by people rather than by systems, and it will not survive a doubling of volume.
- Sales progression, from offer accepted to completion, is largely unmanaged. There's real time and real money in it.
- Performance variance between the best and the worst sales is wide, and people are happy in part, but inconsistency in customer experience means sellers arent always happy, even if they get the right result.
This is not a reactive operations role. You'll be expected to surface problems before they're flagged, bring proposals rather than escalations, and take ownership of turning recommendations into implemented change.
You should be comfortable iterating in live environments, but disciplined enough to turn a successful test into a system. Structure, not bureaucracy.
What you'll own
Marketplace Operations & Scale
Own and improve the operating model behind the managed marketplace, so we can scale from hundreds to thousands of live properties without quality degrading.
Build the processes, playbooks, team structures, management cadence and performance standards that make execution consistent. Create clarity in a fast-moving, high-volume environment, so the business always knows what's happening, what needs attention and what happens next.
The Customer Journey
Own the seller experience from signature to completion. Sellers arrive excited about the proposition; too many of them lose that somewhere in the middle. Fix it.
Improve satisfaction, speed of sale, sell-through and referral rate. Translate feedback and operational insight into better process, better communication and better product. Make the complexity of a multi-agent marketplace feel simple and valuable to the person paying for it.
Strategic improvement
Identify where the marketplace, the journey or the operating model can be improved - then own the implementation.
Work closely with product, data and leadership to turn operational insight into better internal tools and customer-facing experiences. Build and deploy practical AI tooling that removes manual work and increases leverage: feedback collection, agent chasing, status communication and exception routing are all candidates. Use data to understand where the journey breaks down and which changes move speed, satisfaction and sell-through.
Team Leadership
Lead and develop a growing distributed operations team, a significant proportion of it based in South Africa.
Build the scorecards, training, QA and accountability a remote team needs to perform consistently. Hire & coach - set a standard of ownership and pace, and hold it.
Embedded Revenue
Bring a commercial lens to the whole journey. Conveyancing, and other services before, during and after the sale, should sit naturally inside the experience where they genuinely improve it. Today the handoffs between our product lines are leaky and largely untracked.
Who you are
We care about proven capability, not industry background.
- You've scaled a high-growth business, a marketplace, or an operationally complex service business — and you were the one doing it, not adjacent to it.
- You create order in chaos. You build systems where there were people holding things together.
- Strong operational judgement: you can diagnose, prioritise ruthlessly and own the outcome.
- Deep instinct for customer experience and journey design.
- Strong product and data instincts. You can hold your own with engineers and pull your own numbers.
- AI-native in a practical sense — you've actually shipped workflow automation, not just read about it.
- You've hired, managed and improved teams, ideally distributed ones.
- Commercially minded, with experience contributing to revenue expansion or monetisation.
- You can align teams and challenge assumptions without relying on hierarchy — including challenging the founders.
- High ownership, high urgency, high resilience.
Nice to have: property, proptech or marketplace experience; embedding new commercial products into an existing journey; working with offshore teams.
What success looks like
We scale significantly without the experience breaking — and ideally with it improving as we grow. A much larger live customer base, faster sales, higher sell-through, higher satisfaction, more lifetime value per seller.
You won't just run the machine. You'll design, improve and scale it — and there's a clear route to owning Marketplace outright for the person who does that well.
What we offer
- A genuine leadership role in a company reshaping how UK homes are sold.
- Meaningful ownership over operations, customer experience, product execution and commercial expansion.
- Equity and long-term incentive.