Founding Customer & Operations Manager

Location: London Bridge

Working pattern: Mon-Thursday in the office, working from home on Fridays

Reporting to: Sanjay Sood-Smith, COO

Hey, we’re Pesto

We’re building the AI-first operating platform for food and drink brands.

Growing a brilliant brand is hard enough. Running it shouldn’t mean wrestling with endless spreadsheets, disconnected systems and manual processes.

Pesto connects the tools a brand already uses - Shopify, Xero, 3PL software and the wholesaler EDI layer - and takes a good chunk of the operational faff off their plate.

Purchase orders. Stock. COGS and bills of materials. Invoicing. Production and demand planning. All connected in one place.

That gives challenger brands the data, visibility and automation they need to scale - without having to build huge teams to hold everything together.

Now we’re looking for a Founding Customer & Operations Manager to help our customers get the very best from Pesto and shape what we build next.

Why we’re hiring

As our customer base grows, we’re looking for someone to take real ownership of the customer journey - helping us onboard more brands while continuing to deliver a brilliant experience for every customer.

You’ll manage the onboarding process for new brands, get their integrations live, help their teams feel confident using Pesto and make sure they’re getting real value from it.

This isn’t a traditional customer success role. A good chunk of what Pesto does today exists because customers told us what was getting in their way. You’ll be the person closest to those conversations - spotting what’s broken, understanding the real problem underneath each request and helping us decide what to build next.

You’ll also shape how our customer function works as we grow including onboarding, support, escalations and customer health. We have a view on all of it, but we want yours too.

What you’ll be doing

Owning the customer journey (45%)

• Own the onboarding of new brands, from getting their integrations live to training their teams and helping them get value from Pesto quickly
• Manage the ongoing relationship with a portfolio of customers, including regular check-ins
• Build the way we approach onboarding, support and customer success as we grow
• Work out how we measure whether a brand is genuinely thriving with Pesto
• Be the first port of call for day-to-day customer questions before they reach an engineer
• Work closely with our Customer Success Engineer, combining your food and drink operations know-how with their software engineering expertise
• Create customer communications, including regular newsletters
• Develop user guides and videos that help customers get the most from Pesto

Shaping the product (25%)

• Work directly with our COO & CTO, on product and roadmap priorities
• Own the customer input into those decisions - not as a note-taker, but as the person who understands what’s getting in our customers’ way
• Run discovery with customers to test ideas, pressure-test our assumptions and work out what’s worth building before we build it
• Ask the questions that uncover the real problem, rather than simply accepting the requested feature
• Turn what you hear into a clear, structured and prioritised view of what can help customers most
• Push back constructively on customers and engineering when needed
• Test new features and tell us what works, what doesn’t and how we can make them better

Keeping the commercial engine running (20%)

• Support product demos and pre-sales conversations with hands-on product knowledge
• Spot expansion and referral opportunities within our existing customer base
• Help keep our commercial operations running properly, including CRM hygiene, pipeline reporting, renewals and processes
• Develop new workflows and AI automations to make the way we work at Pesto faster and better

Picking up the things that matter (10%)

As part of a start-up there will be broader projects and initiatives to take on, such as:

• Building automations to speed up sales preparation
• Creating customer-facing content
• Working out how to handle a new retailer integration
• Developing the tools we use during onboarding
• Other special projects that will support the business and drive your personal development

What success looks like

Within your first three months, you’ll be running new customer onboarding independently, answering most customer questions and contributing ideas about how the product and customer experience could be improved.

By six months, you’ll own relationships across the existing customer base. You’ll have created a documented, repeatable approach to onboarding and support, alongside a clear feedback loop between customers and product.

By the end of your first year, you’ll be focused on customer retention and satisfaction, running discovery ahead of roadmap decisions and seeing significant product features developed from the problems you’ve uncovered.

You’ll also be discussing what comes next, whether that’s developing towards a Chief of Staff role or building a customer team around you.

You might be a great fit if you…

• Have at least three years’ experience in operations, customer success or account management, either within a consumer brand or a B2B SaaS business serving them
• Have worked in or with food, drink, FMCG or consumer goods businesses
• Understand how retail or grocery supply chains work, know what a purchase order is and understand why SKUs and batch codes matter
• Are genuinely comfortable working with spreadsheets and data, as you'll be managing reconciliations and integration setup, not just managing the relationship
• Are happy to roll your sleeves up, work across different areas of the business and figure things out without an existing playbook
• Have ideas of your own, the confidence to share them and a genuine interest in improving how things are done
• Actively use AI to improve the quality and efficiency of your work
• Are excited by the opportunity to help build the defining software that food and drink brands run their businesses on

It would be an advantage if you…

• Have hands-on experience with some of the systems our customers use, such as Shopify, Xero or 3PL tools
• Have helped customers or internal teams adopt new software, systems or processes
• Have worked closely with product or engineering teams, using customer feedback to help shape product improvements
• Have created your own AI workflows or automations to make the way you work more efficient

Why this role is different

You’ll shape what gets built

Our roadmap has largely been shaped by what our customers have told us.

You’ll become that channel - working directly with the COO & CTO on prioritisation and using your own customer relationships to work out what’s worth building. Here, you’ll be part of that decision.

You’ll build the customer function

You won’t be inheriting a rigid customer success function with embedded processes.

You’ll help create the onboarding approach, support process and measures we use to understand whether customers are successful. You’ll build something you can point to throughout the rest of your career.

You’ll work directly with the founders

You’ll sit with the COO & CTO every day, with no layers between you and the decisions being made.

You’ll have somewhere real to grow

This is a deliberately broad founding role. Depending on your strengths and ambitions, the realistic next step could be Head of Customer or Chief of Staff - and we see that as being 12–18 months away, not five years.

The practical bits

• Salary: £40,000-£50,000
• Equity options
• Pension
• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays
• Your birthday off
• Mon-Thursday in the London Bridge office, Fridays working from home
• Flexible approach

Everyone is welcome at Pesto

We are proud to be a diverse team. We have a female CEO and diverse representation in the team across nationalities, gender and LGBTQIA+.

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, and you don’t need a degree to work here. Strong opinions on snacks, however, are essential.

If you need any reasonable adjustments during the hiring process, please let us know so we can accommodate.