Operations Associate

Plinth; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 48,000 - 52,000; Full time

Job summary

Plinth, a London-based software partner for charities, is hiring an operations-generalist to own recruitment operations, contracting and invoicing, and the ISO 27001 certification paperwork.

You will build repeatable processes, automate routine tasks, and scale as the team grows, collaborating with the Chief of Staff to keep interviews, invoices and security evidence on track.

Qualifications

• You are highly organised and can manage multiple tasks without dropping anything.
• Willingness to take on unfamiliar work and learn out loud with peers.
• Experience coordinating a variety of admin functions and documents.

Responsibilities

• Own recruitment operations end to end and coordinate scheduling.
• Manage contracting, invoicing and related filing.
• Oversee ISO 27001 certification paperwork and evidence.
• Answer security questionnaires and build a reusable answer bank.
• Automate repeatable tasks with templates and workflows.
• Grow the role by taking on additional operational areas.

Skills

Organiser

Adaptable

Clear communicator

Discretion

AI tooling familiarity

Tools

Automation tools

Job description

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