Director, Founder's Office (Talent & Performance)

Director, Founder’s Office (Talent & Performance)

Location: Nine Elms, London - Full-time (5 days a week on-site)

Zapp is building something challenging with a team that holds itself to impeccable high standards. As Talent & Performance Lead, you will own the engine that keeps the standards high.

This is not a people operations role. It is a high-performance organisation role. You will report directly to the Director of Growth and Strategy and work closely with the founder and leadership team to make Zapp the kind of organisation that attracts exceptional people, develops them fast, and retains them by being genuinely worth staying for.

If you have spent your career excelling and scaling organisations, we want to hear from you.

About Zapp

Zapp is London’s leading premium convenience retail platform. Founded in 2020, our vision is to disrupt the multi-trillion dollar convenience retail market, currently dominated by major players, by developing best-in-class customer‑centric technology and fulfilment solutions. Zapp partners with some of the world’s leading brands to deliver an exclusive range of hand‑picked products 24/7, delivered in minutes.

Key Responsibilities

What You Will Own

• High‑Performance Culture and OKR Cadence: Help shape the future of Zapp by owning the company’s quarterly OKR‑setting process end‑to‑end: from leadership alignment through to team‑level cascade, ensuring every individual understands how their work connects to the company’s commercial objectives.
• Design and run the performance review and calibration cycles that drive genuine accountability. Honest conversations that raise the bar.
• Embed the Leadership Principles into how people are assessed, promoted, recognised, and managed out, making high performance a lived standard, not a stated value.
• Build and run the recognition and reward rhythms that make exceptional work visible, creating a culture where the best people feel seen and the bar stays high.
• Partner with senior leaders to coach them on performance conversations, team health, and how to build the kind of direct, high‑trust relationships that make teams perform.

Company Narrative and All‑Hands

• Own the design and execution of Zapp's company all‑hands: shaping the narrative, structure, and energy of the moments that bring the whole business together.
• Work with the founder and leadership team to translate commercial progress into a story the team can feel proud of and aligned behind.
• Ensure every company‑wide moment, whether a quarterly all‑hands, a team milestone, or an internal announcement, reinforces Zapp's culture and raises collective ambition.

EVP and External Desirability

• Define and own Zapp's Employer Value Proposition: what makes Zapp a compelling place to work, expressed consistently across every candidate and employee touchpoint.
• Drive Zapp's external employer brand presence across LinkedIn, press and industry events, making Zapp visible and desirable to the calibre of people the business needs to hire.
• Represent Zapp at external events, panels, and industry moments as a credible voice on culture, performance, and what building a high‑performance organisation actually looks like.
• Work with Marketing to ensure Zapp's employer brand is as strong as its consumer brand.

Talent and Promotion

• Set and hold the bar on how Zapp hires: the assessment standard, the candidate experience, and the speed of decision‑making.
• Own senior and business‑critical hiring personally, partnering with the founder on the decisions that matter most.
• Design and run Zapp's promotion framework, ensuring progression is earned, transparent, and tied to genuine performance rather than tenure or politics.
• Build Zapp's internal leadership pipeline, identifying who the next generation of leaders are and creating the conditions for them to grow into those roles.

People Operations

• Ensure the fundamentals are clean and compliant: contracts, policies, right to work, and employee relations handled with care and commercial awareness.
• Manage a small people team, maintaining operational excellence without letting process become the product.

Who You Are

• Proven experience in a high‑growth business where performance culture and commercial pace both mattered.
• A track record of building or transforming OKR and performance frameworks that actually changed how people worked.
• A credible, confident presence with founders and senior leaders. You give honest counsel and hold your position without needing a hierarchy to lean on.
• Commercially minded. You balance the nuanced needs of a high‑performance business with the right decisions for team culture.
• A builder and a standard‑setter. You are energised by raising the bar and frustrated by organisations that tolerate average.
• Strong external presence. You are comfortable representing a business publicly and have the credibility to attract exceptional people to Zapp's story.

What You Will Not Find Here

• A large team to delegate to. This role requires someone who leads and does.
• A business that mistakes process for progress. We care about outcomes, not paperwork.
• A culture that tolerates average. The bar at Zapp is high, and in this role you set that standard more than almost anyone else in the business.

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity package.
• Enjoy 25 days of holiday per year (plus all bank holidays).
• Private Health Insurance.
• Extended sick pay and maternity/paternity leave pay.
• Cycle to work scheme.

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