Founding Service & Operations Lead

Full-time · Remote · United Kingdom

Loowatt is looking for a Founding Service & Operations Lead to build the operational engine behind our ZenLoo product. You'll start by running the service end to end yourself, then design your own manual work out of existence with the processes, tooling and automation that let it scale. As the role grows, you'll take what you've built to our household sanitation services in Madagascar and South Africa, creating the blueprint for how Loowatt scales into new markets. This is a role for someone driven to build something from the ground up, with real ownership and real impact.

About Loowatt & ZenLoo

Loowatt is a UK-based toilet technology company driven by a simple belief that everyone should have a ****toilet that is safe and clean, protects water resources, supports circular economies, and most importantly, brings joy to everyday life.

Loowatt toilets provide a user experience akin to a flush toilet, without the need for water. Our products save significant water and energy, and are ideally suited to any off-grid or water-scarce locations.

Loowatt has a strong presence in emerging markets, particularly in Madagascar and South Africa, where HomeLoo is deployed to residents of urban informal settlements. You can learn more about these companies and their services at Loowatt MG and Kaloola.

Loowatt uses the same toilet technology for offgrid applications in the UK and beyond under the ZenLoo brand. ZenLoo sales help us to cross-subsidise Loowatt’s impactful work in emerging markets, while also delivering significant environmental benefits with each toilet saving thousands of litres of water and protecting fragile ecosystems where septic or composting solutions are inappropriate.

ZenLoo toilets have proven product-market fit in off-grid applications, including early customers in the events and off-grid leisure sectors in the UK and South Africa. There is significant potential for ZenLoo in the UK and beyond, making this an exciting time to join the team as we move from sales launch into scale-up.

The Opportunity

We've built sanitation products that people love to use and are willing to pay for. Now we're looking for the person who will design the services and customer experience around them, and build the operational foundations to scale.

You will start by running ZenLoo service operations yourself, getting hands on and across the service end to end. Then you will systematically rebuild it, designing all manual work out of existence. Replacing it with repeatable process, tooling and automation.

You will do the grunt work. Receiving orders, managing freight forwarders, speaking to customers, establishing waste collection networks. Not as a rite of passage, but because it is the only honest way to learn how Loowatt works and what needs to be built.

If you are still doing heavy manual work in twelve months, the role has not succeeded.

Once the ZenLoo engine is running, you will apply the same principles to our businesses in Madagascar and South Africa. Where you will build the blueprint, systems and tools that let Loowatt's B2C sanitation services scale rapidly. Changing the status quo of urban sanitation in emerging markets.

This is a full-time, remote role. You will need to be based in the UK and travel to London roughly once a quarter, with more face-to-face time available if you'd like it. You'll also travel across the UK, and occasionally to Europe, to visit customers and service providers. Later in the role, you will travel to our operations in Madagascar and South Africa.

As Loowatt's Founding Service & Operations Lead, you will report to the Head of Product, work closely with the commercial team, and own:

• The end-to-end customer journeys and service design that our sanitation products depend on.
• The end-to-end design and build of the operational engine those services run on.
• The blueprint for operational setup and scaling in existing and for new markets.
• The cost, efficiency and quality of service delivery, and how it holds up at scale.
• The operational data and insights that shape future product decisions, so that our hardware reduces the cost of running our services and improves the experience of those using them.

In practice you will

• Learn the business by running and owning the ZenLoo service end to end, from managing orders, fulfilment, customer onboarding and ongoing support to building out the waste collection network.
• Turn what you learn into customer journeys, service specifications, workflows and operational systems.
• Build the repeatable systems, processes, tooling and automation that let the service run without you.
• Learn how our B2C sanitation services work on the ground in Madagascar and South Africa.
• Apply the principles proven on ZenLoo to design their customer journeys, service specifications, workflows and operational systems.
• Build the operational layer those services need to run and scale, including service management, asset tracking, customer payments and communications, and impact measurement.
• Create blueprints for ZenLoo and our B2C sanitation services that new markets and operators can run from, so that each launch is faster than the last. These blueprints are how Loowatt scales.

Examples of what great looks like in your first 6 months

• You are running the ZenLoo service end to end yourself, and know every step, cost and failure point first hand.
• SOPs exist for ordering, fulfilment, waste collection, customer support and aftersales, written so that someone else could follow them tomorrow, or better still run without them.
• The ZenLoo service blueprint and operational engine are mapped, the main sources of manual effort identified and automated away, and cost to serve measured.
• SLAs agreed with multiple UK waste collection providers.
• You are ready to visit our Madagascar and South Africa subsidiaries, to learn and iterate on your operational blueprint for the emerging markets B2C sanitation service.
  

Ideal candidate profile:

Who you are

You don't need to be a seasoned operations veteran. You might be a few years into your career, but you're driven, ambitious and hungry to grow into the role. You roll up your sleeves without ego, fix problems before anyone asks, and build with people, not for them. You're humble enough to learn from others, confident enough to speak up, and genuinely motivated by social and environmental impact.

Must haves

• Experience working in or running a business that delivers physical products or services, getting hands-on with the operational reality, and the technical confidence to learn how a product works inside out, from installation and servicing to troubleshooting faults in the field.
• Evidence of building something without a playbook. This could range from automating your own workflows to building a function from scratch.
• Demonstrable technical literacy across workflow automation platforms, no-code databases, connecting tools together and AI, with a pragmatic view of where AI helps and where it doesn't.
• Commercial acumen and data fluency. You're confident with spreadsheets and structured data, keen to engage with how the business model works (costs, margins, cost to serve, unit economics) rather than only how the process runs, and able to turn numbers into decisions.
• Evidence of designing services with customers and users in mind, such as mapping customer journeys, spending time where the work actually happens, designing around real-world constraints, and measuring the difference it made to the people using it.

Nice to haves

• Hands-on experience running a B2C subscription service built on last-mile logistics, such as meal kits, home delivery, LPG or water distribution, waste collection, laundry, or off-grid and PAYGo utilities, including designing operations and tooling for field teams.
• Experience productising an operating model and replicating it in new sites or markets, such as through a franchise manual, an operator playbook or a service model adopted by a third party.
• Experience managing suppliers and logistics partners, including structuring and negotiating service level agreements and handling international shipping.
• Experience with inventory and stock management, including forecasting, stock control and procurement.
• Experience of operations in emerging markets, or of working across different cultures. French language skills are a bonus (useful for Madagascar).
  

How to apply

Candidates are requested to upload a CV and covering letter and answer a short questionnaire at the link below. If you have come via Jumpstart, please apply through the Jumpstart platform.

The recruitment process includes three interviews, which will require around 2.5 hours of in-person and/or virtual meetings, and 2 hours of preparation for those shortlisted after the first interview.