Chief Operating Officer (COO) 📍 Duxford, Cambridgeshire | 🕒 Full-Time, On-Site

The Opportunity
We are retained by a pioneering clean-tech scale-up, headquartered in Duxford, to appoint a dynamic and commercially focused Chief Operating Officer. This is a critical hire to support the transition from R&D to global commercial deployment, and to build scalable operational infrastructure around a market-ready deep-tech manufacturing platform.

Reporting directly to the CEO and working closely with the senior leadership team, the COO will own operations strategy, manufacturing scale-up, and delivery excellence as the company enters high-growth mode.

Key Responsibilities Operational Leadership

• Develop and implement robust operational frameworks that align with the company’s strategic growth goals
• Drive efficiency, accountability, and cross-functional coordination across R&D, engineering, supply chain, and customer delivery functions

Manufacturing & Supply Chain

• Lead scale-up of manufacturing capabilities (in-house and outsourced), ensuring cost, quality, and time-to-market objectives are met
• Oversee supply chain strategy, procurement, and production planning to support increasing order volumes

Project Delivery & Execution

• Ensure seamless execution of pilot projects, installations, and system rollouts across domestic and international markets
• Partner with product and commercial teams to ensure operations are tightly integrated with customer success

Leadership & Team Building

• Build and develop a high-performing operations and delivery team
• Foster a culture of ownership, clarity, and continuous improvement across the business

Governance & Risk

• Introduce systems to manage operational risk, quality control, compliance, and health & safety across manufacturing and deployment activities

Executive Collaboration

• Contribute to corporate strategy and fundraising conversations as part of the executive leadership team
• Represent operations in board meetings, investor discussions, and strategic partnerships

Candidate Profile Essential

• Proven experience in a COO or senior operations leadership role, ideally within a hardware, industrial, manufacturing, or clean-tech environment
• Track record of scaling operations from pilot stage through to commercial rollout
• Strong experience with manufacturing operations, global supply chain, and technical delivery
• Commercially minded with the ability to align technical teams with market-facing objectives
• Exceptional leadership and people management experience, with a focus on building scalable teams and systems
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, resource-constrained, and innovation-led environment

Desirable

• Experience supporting international deployment, especially across Europe or Asia
• Background in industrial equipment, advanced manufacturing, or sustainability-related technologies
• Engineering or technical background preferred

In terms of benefits offered, you can expect flexible work hours, private medical healthcare (with family cover), 5% employee pension contribution, life insurance 4x annual salary, 33 days total holiday (inc bank holidays) and some other lucrative add-ons.

If you are interested, please drop me an email alex@socode.co.uk or message me on LinkedIn: Alexander Flory