Head of Business Operations

Platform Engineering; Milano; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Platform Engineering Masters is seeking a senior operations leader to own the operations function, lead a small team, and integrate with the leadership team. You will partner with Sales, Growth, Content and Events to design scalable processes, build automations, and deliver reliable systems that reduce manual work.

You will start by understanding current handoffs, then define priorities, establish clear ownership, and coach a growing operations team to ship impact-driven improvements.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to translate business problems into actionable plans.
• Experience designing and delivering automated workflows or integrations.
• Ability to lead across Sales, Growth, Content and Events teams.
• Comfort in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the operations roadmap and prioritise initiatives by business impact.
• Lead a small team and coordinate with founders and leadership.
• Prototype, code, and automate where it accelerates delivery.
• Document workflows and establish reliable ownership and standards.
• Drive adoption of new systems with measurable improvements.

Skills

Structured problem-solving

Automation / scripting

Cross-functional leadership

Strategic thinking

Tools

APIs

Automation tools

CRM/ERP familiarity

Job description

Take over founder-led operations and build the systems that help us grow.

You might be a consultant who moved into a startup, a founder’s associate already running important parts of a business, or an operator who has started building software and automations yourself.

You enjoy understanding how a business works, finding what slows it down, and making it work better. You can turn an unclear problem into a practical plan, bring people with you, and build the first solution.

We are looking for someone ready to take that ability further: own our operations function, lead a small team, and join the company’s leadership team.

About Us

Platform Engineering Masters is the company behind platformengineering.org and PlatformCon. We bring together engineers, technology leaders and vendors through our community, conferences, education and Weave Intelligence.

As the business grows, the systems behind it need to grow too: how we deliver for customers, run events, produce content, understand performance and share information across teams.

Our co-founder, Christoph currently leads operations. You will work closely with him during the handover, then take responsibility for running and developing the function independently. You will report to Luca, our Managing Director.

The challenge

We have a working business, an existing operations team and plenty already being built. We also have manual handovers, disconnected information and processes that depend too much on particular people.

Your job is to decide what needs attention, understand the business problem behind each request, and lead the work through to a solution people actually use.

Some of the questions you will tackle:

• How do we turn a customer commitment into a reliable delivery process across sales, content and events?
• How do we give teams trustworthy information about what is working and where to focus?
• How do we make recurring work, such as publishing a webinar or delivering a sponsored asset, easy to run consistently?
• Which problems need custom software, which need better use of existing tools, and which simply need a clearer process?
• How do we keep improving our systems without making the business dependent on their original builders?

What you will own

The operations roadmap. Work directly with Sales, Growth, Content and Events to understand their needs. Prioritize by business impact, challenge requests where necessary, and make trade-offs explicit, including when requests come from founders.

A small, growing team. You will manage our existing revenue operations and systems engineering specialists from the start, and help recruit and develop additional content/design and growth operations capacity.

Hands-on delivery. Prototype, write code, connect systems and build automations yourself when that is the fastest way to make progress. Give your team clear direction and space to own delivery.

Systems that last. Make sure critical workflows have clear ownership, useful documentation and sensible standards for reliability, access and maintenance.

Adoption and results. Work with business teams until the solution is part of their everyday work. Judge success by better delivery, useful information and time saved.

Your remit is the operational systems supporting the business. Functional leaders own their commercial, editorial and event outcomes; you work with them to make those outcomes easier to achieve.

What You Will Bring

• Structured problem-solving and strong communication. You can understand an internal customer’s needs, question assumptions and explain a recommendation clearly. Consulting or similar client-facing experience would be useful.
• Evidence that you build. You have used code, APIs, automation or AI tools to solve real problems. You can walk us through what you built, why you chose that approach and what happened when people used it.
• Commercial judgment. You connect operational improvements to revenue, delivery quality, cost or capacity.
• Ownership in an ambiguous environment. You can make progress without a complete brief and follow through when implementation gets difficult.
• Readiness to lead. You can set priorities, give useful feedback and hold a small team accountable while staying close to the work.
• Curiosity about technology and the business. You learn unfamiliar tools and domains quickly and care about the quality of the result.

Experience managing processes in a startup would be valuable. You do not need to have held a Head of Operations title or worked in every area this role touches. We care more about your judgment, learning speed and track record than a particular CRM certification or tool stack.

What Success Looks Like

In your first months, you will establish clear priorities with the team, take ownership of the most important systems and deliver improvements that business teams can see and use.

Over time, routine work will run with fewer manual interventions, teams will have better information, and the founders will be able to step out of day-to-day operations with confidence.

Why join

You will inherit a real team, work directly with leadership and have the mandate to shape an important part of a growing business. This is an opportunity to move from solving individual problems to owning the function that solves them.