🧭 Chief of Staff - Customer
People & HR, Operations, Customer Service
London, UK
Posted on Aug 22, 2026
🌍 About the Role
At Zinc, we're rapidly technologising how we serve candidates, recruiters, and customers, without eroding what makes our service genuinely good. This is a brand-new role at Zinc: part of a small, fast-moving team that exists to accelerate the customer function's ability to continuously improve how we serve customers, through better technology, process, and entirely new capabilities.
You'll report directly to the Chief Customer Officer, and partner closely with the Director of CS, Director of Retention + Expansion, and Head of Ops. Right now, the team's first big mandate is standing up a 24-hour, multi-region outsourced live-chat operation, but that's one project among many. This role exists to take on the big, cross-functional things that currently move too slowly (or don't start at all) because the people who'd need to run them are already fully occupied serving customers.
What's more, you will be a key strategic partner to our CCO Tom, helping to ensure the Customer function strategy is executed across the business.
🧩 The Complexity (why this role isn't for everyone)
- This is a new function with no fixed playbook and no large dedicated team to lean on; you'll build capability mostly through people who don't fully report to you.
- This is a brand new role with impact that sits across a complex cross-functional group of people and problems. Ambiguity about scope and shape isn't a bug here; it's most of the job in year one.
- A meaningful chunk of your time goes into managing the tension between colleagues' day-job commitments and the new work you need from them; this takes real influence and negotiation, not just a project plan.
- You'll operate at very different altitudes in the same week: deep in a specific vendor negotiation one day, shaping cross-functional prioritisation with the CCO the next.
We are open to diverse backgrounds that can bring transferable skills to this role, but expect the ideal candidate to come from one of the following backgrounds:
- Ex-strategy consultants turned operators
- Startup Operations + Strategy roles
- Customer Transformation Leaders
- People Ops/Experience Leaders