Strategy and Operations Manager - South Africa

Location: Claremont,Cape Town, South Africa
Salary: R850,000 - R1,000,000 per annum
Type: Full-time, 4 days on-site.
Contract type: Full time, temp to perm, permanent contract starting after 6 month probationary period.
Working hours: 8am – 5:00pm UK time (9:00am – 6:00pm SA time in UK Summer, 10am – 7pm SA time in UK Winter)

*If your salary expectations do not meet our banding, please do still apply - salary banding is based on transferable skills, tenure, industry experience, and interview performance

Hi, I’m Daryl, VP of Supply and Operations at Zen Educate

I have been part of Zen’s phenomenal growth since we launched in 2017, and I am looking for a Strategy and Operations Manager in Cape Town.

🌍 What we’re building and why

Here’s the challenge: UK schools spend over £2 billion a year on temporary staff. But £600m of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies, money that should be going back into classrooms and teachers’ pay. So we’re doing things differently.

Zen Educate is an online platform that gives schools instant access to fully vetted teachers and support staff. Since launching in 2017, we’ve already saved schools over £30 million, that’s gone straight back to where it matters most. We've just closed a $37m Series B (the biggest EdTech round in Europe last year!), and we’re scaling fast in the UK and the US 🚀. We are incredibly proud to be a Certified B Corporation™! It’s an exciting time to join, have a huge impact, and grow alongside us.

Your chance to make a difference

Zen makes large supply-side decisions every week. These include:

• How many educators to recruit and where

• How much to spend on new leads vs reactivating existing leads

• How to improve our processes to provide candidates a great experiences

• How to make sure all our regions have the liquidity needed to meet the demands of their schools

All of these decisions are ones which can be improved. This role exists to fix that. You'll own the analysis, and you'll own whether anyone acts on it.

You'll report to the General Manager of the Cape Town office, who is deep in these problems and will work on them alongside you. This is a small, senior team with a large remit, which means unusual ownership and no layers between you and the decisions.

Our ideal candidate

We're looking for someone with a demonstrated record of strong performance who wants to move from advising to owning.This is likely a fit for someone with 2 to 5 years of experience in consulting, private equity, investing, high-growth startups, or another demanding analytical environment. Candidates with strong mathematical ability are preferred.

You will need:

• Genuine analytical horsepower. You will be building models, not commissioning them. Advanced spreadsheet work is a given, and comfort writing SQL is a strong advantage.
  
  

• The instinct to check what a number is actually measuring before building on it.
  
  

• The ability to take an ambiguous commercial problem, structure it, and reach a defensible answer quickly.
  
  

• Credibility with operators: Regional leads and account managers will only use your work if they trust you, and trust here is earned by doing the work, and being humble enough to realise the first cut is rarely perfect

Traits that usually correlate with success in this role:

• Relentless drive to deliver outcomes
  
  

• Strong analytical judgment
  
  

• Clear, logical, compelling communication
  
  

• High ownership
  
  

• Low ego
  
  

• Ability to influence stakeholders
  
  

• Excitement to move between analysis and hands-on execution
  
  

• Genuine care for the mission

No one at Zen is above the work, and that is especially true in this role. Some weeks that means building a model. Some weeks it means cleaning the data underneath it, or sitting with an account manager to work out why three roles went unfilled.

💡 What you might like or dislike

You will not have a team. You will have a manager who is deep in the problem, direct access to leadership, and the expectation that you make things happen through other people rather than through headcount.

Your work will change how Zen onboards educators to the platform quickly - this involves conducting data analysis on where our bottlenecks are, and running a cadence of experiments to improve our operational efficiency.

🎁 What’s in it for you?

• Competitive salary

• 25 days of holiday in line with UK education term dates, plus UK bank holidays.

• Meaningful work - this isn’t just another SaaS tool; you’re literally helping schools save money and pay teachers more.

• 1-1 coaching to keep you growing personally and professionally.

• Matching Provident Fund, Group Risk Benefits and health insurance contributions

• Join a certified B Corp: where your work creates a real, positive impact.

💜 Diversity & inclusion

At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives, just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work.

We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we’ve had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team.

Please note before applying

This role is based at our Cape Town office and requires onsite attendance four days per week. We encourage applications from candidates who live in or near the local area of this office, or plan on relocating.

🚀 Ready to make a difference?

If this sounds like the right level of exciting, apply! And if you're not sure you tick every box, but this sounds like the kind of work you're built for, reach out anyway.