Head of Operations – EV Infrastructure Platform

Arnhem, Gelderland | 90k - 100k + Shares | Permanent

A bit about the company

I’ve worked with them since they started. A fast-growing scale-up building the platform that enterprise clients rely on to manage EV charging infrastructure. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, the phones ring. That’s the environment this role lives in.

Past the early chaos and into the phase where the way things run actually matters. A concentrated base of large enterprise clients, each one significant to the business. Reliability isn’t a metric; it’s the whole product.

The role;

This is a leadership team seat reporting directly to the C-level. You’ll manage a team of 10-11 Operations Engineers, including two senior engineers who carry the technical depth. Your job isn’t to be the most technically capable person in the room, it’s to make the whole function better.

The team is already running. What’s been missing is a leader who can elevate it: cleaner processes, clearer standards, stronger people, and someone who sets the tone when things get difficult.

You’ll be in the room on company OKRs and leadership decisions. You’ll own hiring, performance, and how the team develops over time. And you’ll be the person clients indirectly depend on, not through a support queue, but through the reliability of the platform they run their operations on.

What the day-to-day looks like;

Owning how the team responds when things break: incident response, root cause, corrective action, and making sure the same thing doesn’t break twice. Monitoring the platform proactively so clients don’t find the problems first. Spotting where processes are slow or manual and fixing that. Running 1:1s, development conversations, and making the hard calls when needed. And sitting with the leadership team on the bigger picture.

What I’m looking for;

You’ve worked at a SaaS platform business that scaled, ideally somewhere that grew from 20-30 people to 100 or more, and you were there for the journey. You understand what it means to run operations when uptime is contractual, and enterprise clients feel every outage.

Technically, you’ve owned monitoring, incident management, and operational processes. You know enough to set the standard and hold people to it, but you’re not here to do it yourself. You’ll need to have owned monitoring and alerting across a live platform, run incident response end to end from first alert through to client communication and post-mortem, and be credible enough in infrastructure and deployment to hold a real conversation with your engineers. The specific tooling matters less than the process behind it.

Useful but not essential: experience reducing manual operational overhead through automation, familiarity with Azure or similar cloud environments.

More important than any of that: you stay calm when the pressure is on. You don’t get pulled into the drama when a release goes wrong and clients are calling. You keep the team’s energy up, take the learnings, and move forward. That’s the skill that matters most here, and it’s harder to find than the technical stuff.

You’re also commercially switched on. With a concentrated enterprise client base, you need to know which accounts are at risk before the account manager does — and act on it.

The other bits;

Based in the Netherlands, within commuting distance of the office. Three days a week in person, more in the early months. 40 hours preferred; some flexibility for the right person. €90k–100k plus equity from day one. Two-stage interview process, and they move fast when they find the right person.