Head Of Impact

Eql Tech; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 60,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare (dental & mental)

Personal development allowance

Flexible working

Team socials

25 days annual leave + bank holidays

Job summary

Zero Gravity is seeking a Head of Impact in London, with a hybrid in-office pattern (3-5 days/week). The role leads the charitable fund, setting strategy with the CEO and trustees, and building funding relationships to fund ambitious impact delivery, including AI-enabled models for under-resourced schools.

You will own governance, financial controls, and the funding propositions that move real money toward closing the gap between talent and opportunity for young people.

Qualifications

• Genuine, demonstrable belief in the mission
• UK-based with right to work in the UK (in-office schedule is a hard requirement)
• Ability to handle genuinely ambiguous work with no playbook
• Ability to build relationships with senior funders from a cold start
• Ability to write and pitch funding propositions that move money
• Strong strategic thinking and theory of change
• Governance and financial discipline
• Hands-on fluency with AI tools and applying them to real problems

Responsibilities

• Set the Fund's strategy with the CEO and Trustees
• Design impact delivery models, including AI-enabled delivery methods
• Build funder relationships from a cold start and shape propositions for grants
• Run charity governance end-to-end with quarterly trustee packs
• Own day-to-day numbers: financial controls, treasury, audit prep, VAT
• Build and grow a small team as the fund scales

Job description

Head of Impact | Zero Gravity | London-hybrid | £50k-£60k

Who Zero Gravity are

Zero Gravity is a tech platform connecting students from low-income backgrounds to university and career opportunities - over 23,000 students supported into top universities to date. In April 2026 they launched an AI-powered tutor, already showing strong early engagement and attainment results, and have since won a government contract to scale it across the UK.

EQL Tech is Zero Gravity's exclusive recruitment partner for this search - all applications and enquiries for this role are handled by EQL Tech on Zero Gravity's behalf.

The role

Zero Gravity runs a charitable fund alongside its core organisation - one that's already put real money behind disadvantaged young people, and is now looking for someone to take it from “well-run” to “genuinely ambitious.” That's this role.

You'll set strategy directly with the CEO and the trustee board, then go and build the funding relationships - banks, consultancies, foundations, major donors - that make that strategy fundable. You'll also design what the impact actually looks like on the ground, including new AI-enabled delivery models for under-resourced schools. And underneath all of it, you're the person keeping governance and the books airtight enough that none of the above is at risk.

It's an unusual mix: part strategist, part fundraiser, part governance lead, and - because the Fund's delivery model increasingly runs through the organisation's own AI-tutoring technology - part product collaborator too. Most people are strong at one of those. This role needs someone credible across all of them.

Mission comes before everything else here. Zero Gravity doesn't treat “passionate about impact” as a nice-to-have line on a CV - they're looking for someone who's genuinely bought into closing the gap between where a young person starts and what they're capable of, and who'd be doing something in this space even if this exact job didn't exist. That conviction has to be real enough to survive a hard trustee conversation or a funder who says no, not just a values-fit answer in an interview.

What you'll actually be doing

• Setting the Fund's strategy directly with the CEO and Trustees - genuinely weighing the options on the table, not just executing a plan handed down to you
• Designing how impact actually lands on the ground, including new AI-enabled delivery models, and working cross-functionally with product and engineering so the technology and the mission stay pointed at the same target
• Building funder relationships from a cold start to committed - banks, consultancies, foundations, major donors - and shaping what they're already doing into propositions that get grant applications over the line
• Running charity governance end to end, including quarterly trustee board packs built to hold up under real scrutiny, not just tick a box
• Owning the numbers day to day - financial controls, treasury, audit prep, VAT - so ambition never outruns what the books can actually support
• Building and growing a small team, including the people side of that as it scales, not just holding the reins

Where you'll be

Central London, 3-5 days/week in the office.

Requirements

Who we're looking for

• Genuine, demonstrable belief in the mission - closing the gap between talent and opportunity for young people the system has overlooked. This is weighted equally with the criteria below, not a tie-breaker: someone brilliant on paper who's lukewarm on why this work matters isn't right for this role.
• UK-based, with the right to work here without sponsorship - the in-office schedule makes this a hard requirement, not a preference
• Comfortable owning genuinely ambiguous work with no existing playbook
• Can build a relationship with a senior funder from a cold start
• Can write and pitch a funding proposition that actually gets money moving, not just a well-formatted deck
• Real strategic chops - you can build a theory of change, not just recite the phrase
• Governance and financial discipline - you won't let the ambition outrun the paperwork
• Real, hands-on fluency with AI tools, applied to actual problems rather than as a buzzword on a CV

Strong signal, not a requirement

• Experience scaling partnerships from inside a tech company
• Startup-stage experience (roughly 20-100 people)

Compensation, benefits & culture

• Central London, hybrid (3-5 days/week in office)
• Direct strategic input into a fund that's already moving meaningful money to the people it's meant to help - not a junior seat several steps removed from the mission
• Share options - genuine ownership in the business, not a token gesture
• Private healthcare, including dental and mental health support, plus gym discounts
• An annual personal-development allowance to spend on your own growth
• Flexible working around the in-office requirement, with equipment set up so you can do your best work from day one
• Fortnightly team socials on the house, plus bigger quarterly events
• 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays, with extra days off over the Christmas shutdown

Values aren't a poster on the wall here - they're genuinely what holds the team, members, partners, donors and investors together as one community, and it shows up in how decisions actually get made, not just in the induction deck.