Operations Associate
Plinth · London · £50,000 (stated in the posting)
TLDR: Plinth builds software for charities, foundations and funders. 2,000+ UK organisations use us, we add 7+ clients a month, and we ship constantly. HR, security, legal and finance currently sit with one person. That stops working at our next size. We're hiring someone to own a chunk of it: recruitment operations, contracts and invoicing, and the paperwork behind our ISO 27001 certification. You don't need to have done security or legal work before. You need to be the kind of person who picks up something unfamiliar, works out how it should run, then runs it properly.
What you'll own
Recruitment operations. The pipeline end to end. Keeping our tools current, booking interviews, wrangling schedules, first-pass CV screening, and working with team leads to build the tasks candidates get set. Candidates never wait on us
Contracting and invoicing. Contracts out, chased, signed and filed. Invoices raised and paid. Unglamorous, and it matters that someone holds it
Security administration. We're going through ISO 27001 now, and keeping a certification is more work than getting one. Reviews on a schedule, evidence that has to exist, paperwork that has to be generated. You own that calendar and it doesn't slip
Security questionnaires. Customers send long ones and they hold up deals. You'll answer them with support from the team and our internal tooling, and build a reusable answer bank so the tenth takes an hour instead of a day. You don't need to be a security expert. You do need to be confident enough to learn out loud
Automating the repeatable bits. A lot of this job is the same task on a loop, and a lot of it shouldn't be. Doing something by hand for the tenth time is a bug you're responsible for. You'll build the templates, automations and AI workflows that take it off your plate, then move on to harder work
Making the role bigger. Ops is four functions and one and a half people. As we grow, you're first in line for whatever you've shown you can hold
What we're looking for
You're the organiser. The one who books the group holiday, runs the spreadsheet and gets everyone to actually pay. That instinct is most of this job
You'll have a go at unfamiliar work. We'll hand you a contract, a security review, or a process nobody has written down. You won't be on your own with it, but we need someone whose instinct is to attempt it, ask a colleague to check it, and be better at it next time, rather than wait to be shown
You've probably done this shape of job. EA, team assistant, ops coordinator, office manager, practice manager. Somewhere you were the reliable centre of a lot of moving parts
Nothing gets quietly dropped. Interviews, invoices, an ISO review and a half-finished questionnaire, all live at once, none of them missing
You write clearly and fast. To candidates, to customers' IT teams, to a lawyer. Warm, plain, no waffle
Discretion. You'll be close to salary data, contracts and personal information from day one
You use AI properly. You've used Claude or similar beyond chatting: drafting, summarising, first passes at questionnaires, small workflows you built yourself. If you've touched Claude Code or automation tools, say so. It's how a small ops team keeps up with a company doubling every six months
Nice to have
Exposure to ISO 27001, SOC 2 or Cyber Essentials, from any angle
Experience with recruitment
Experience with contracts, procurement or finance admin
Charity, funder or local government background
What good looks like after a year
Recruitment runs without the Chief of Staff touching the logistics
ISO reviews and evidence are on schedule and audit-ready, with no scramble the week before
Security questionnaires come back in days, from a library you built, and stop blocking deals
The tasks you did by hand in month one are automated, templated, or gone
You own things outright that nobody else needs to think about
Logistics
Location: London, Old Street (4 days a week in office)
Hours: Full time
Salary: c.£50,000 depending on experience
Reports to: Chief of Staff, who leads operations