Head of Operations

Aquila; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in company

Generous parental leave

Relocation budget & support

Flexible working hours & location

Unlimited personal leave

Side project / skills budget

Company-wide social events

Great office with laser facilities

Job summary

Aquila is seeking a Head of Operations in Sydney to build and lead a small operations team, owning cross-functional processes and driving early-stage scalability.

You will be a partner to the CEO, tackling high-priority problems, incubating new functions, and hiring long-term owners while remaining hands-on when needed. You’ll work with engineers and product teams to shape the company’s operating model and drive measurable impact.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading early-stage operations in startups.
• Strong people management and hiring experience.
• Ability to incubate new functions and drive practical outcomes.
• Comfortable working with engineers, product and commercial teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a small generalist operations team.
• Prioritize and resolve critical operational issues before they escalate.
• Define scalable processes and platforms across the business.
• Partner with the CEO to align strategy with execution.

Skills

Leadership

Startup experience

Hiring & team-building

Strategic prioritization

Hands-on execution

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

NONE

Job description

Operations enables, accelerates, markets and lifts up the tech and the company. We're just at the cusp of expanding this team out, and we're looking for a Head of Operations who has run business operations before - ideally in a startup context.

You will be a true partner to our CEO: the company's on-call firefighter and builder. When a mission-critical area has no owner, you step in, build it, and lead it, whether that's legal and compliance, people and finance, procurement, or the operational side of getting our technology into the field. Often you'll incubate a function yourself, prove out how it should work, then hire and hand over to its long-term leader before moving on to the next one.

This isn't a role with a fixed set of duties. It's a leadership role over a flexible operations team that takes on whatever the business needs most at a given time, and reshapes as those needs change. Your team tackles the hair-on-fire problems, solves, and automates the solutions across every discipline bar technical R&D. You'll decide when something is worth building into a permanent function and who on your team is right for which problem. Your team's job is to see problems coming, solve them before they get too painful, and stay pointed at whatever matters most to Aquila at any moment.

What You'll Own:

• Building and leading the team: recruit, hire, and manage a small group of generalist operators, and set the standard for how they work.
• Deciding where the team's attention goes: spot the operational problems that matter before they become urgent, and prioritise across them rather than just reacting to whatever is loudest.
• Developing your people: understand where each person is strongest, put them on the problems that fit, and know when someone needs to be moved off something before it stalls out.
• Giving your team real context: make sure the people working these problems understand the business reasoning behind them, not just the task in front of them.
• Incubating new functions: stand up the areas Aquila doesn't have yet, run them until they're working, then hire the right person to own them long term.

What You'll Bring:

• You're a hands-on operator and leader who loves taking on ambitious things that shouldn't work, and helping build the teams, products, culture and businesses that prove they can.
• You've been the first or early operator at a startup through a step-change, for example R&D to commercial, a major product launch, a large fundraise or rapid team growth, and you can point to concrete outcomes you drove.
• You've built functions from scratch, preferably across multiple disciplines (think legal and regulatory, people, finance, product or go-to-market)
• You've built and run an operations or business-operations team before, ideally at an early-stage or fast-growing company - you know the difference between doing the job yourself and building a team that does it well.
• You have a sharp hiring bar and you hold to it. You know what a strong generalist operator looks like, and you're not tempted to lower the bar under time pressure.
• You have excellent judgement about where attention should go, even when several things feel urgent at once.
• You're genuinely curious. You ask better questions than most people in the room, and that's how you get up to speed on complex tech and unfamiliar problems fast.
• You default to hands-on. You're just as comfortable digging into the detail yourself as you are directing someone.
• You have zero ego about scope. "That's not my job" isn't in your vocabulary, and it won't be in your team's either.
• You're genuinely energised by working alongside engineers, not just tolerant of it.
• You do your best work when the mission and potential for impact are clear, but the path isn't. You bring high ownership, curiosity, empathy and a sense of humour, connect strategy with execution, and get things done.
• Everyone is an owner. In addition to excellent base compensation, everyone owns equity in the company, so we all benefit from our hard work and future success.
• Generous paid parental leave. We offer eight weeks of parental leave above the government-allocated amount.
• Relocation budget & support. Support for interstate or overseas team members and their families (including pets!).
• Flexible working hours and location. While most days we spend shooting lasers around in our fully decked-out laser facilities, if there are days when we can work from anywhere, then we feel free to work from anywhere!
• Generous Personal Leave. At Aquila, we recognise that sometimes you need time off to recuperate, look after your mental health, or deal with an emergency. We provide unlimited (within reason) personal leave to empower you to bring your best self to work every day, and you are always paid for days taken off as personal leave.
• We care about our people: At Aquila, we don't focus on what our people can do for us; we focus on what we can do for our people. As part of our commitment to our people, we provide an annual $1k budget for side projects, health, gizmos and gadgets you want to develop, skills you want to learn, and ways you want to grow outside work.
• Company-wide social events: offsite hiking and/or skiing through beautiful Australian landscapes, annual end-of-year celebrations, and much more!
• Great, decked-out office! An inclusive community and culture in a welcoming office with lasers, cutting-edge hardware, snacks, and actual tech you can tinker with (within the bounds of safety).
• Aquila welcomes applicants from all backgrounds and has around 40% female representation on our team. Join our team and help us build an infinitely scalable energy network that powers a more abundant, limitless, and sustainable future!