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Vice President of Operations

Amber Electric

About Amber

Amber is a new way to buy power, designed for a world powered by renewable energy. We give customers direct access to the real-time wholesale electricity price as it varies every 30 mins and the technology to shift more of their energy usage to the times when cheaper renewables are available in the grid. It’s a cheaper way to buy power and the fastest way for Australia to reach 100% renewable energy.

We are growing rapidly and have thousands of customers who love what we are doing and a great product that will play a significant role in driving Australia towards a renewable future. We are backed by Australia’s leading VCs including Square Peg Capital, Giant Leap (Impact Investment Group) and Black Sheep Capital. We’re now at a critical moment in taking the business to real scale as we disrupt a huge market for the better.

We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace and a great culture of people who love coming to work to build a better world. You’d be a part of a rapidly growing team of 20 with expertise across energy, technology, marketing, and operations.

About the Role

As the VP of Operations, you'll be leading our operations team. We believe this team is the beating heart of Amber - it's the team that is closest to our customers, and the one that drives the rest of business. We're on a big missions to shift Australia to 100% renewables by using the power of every Australian home (and business) to shift load to when renewables are available. This starts with creating an exceptional experience for each of our thousands of customers - and that experience often starts (but by no means ends) with our operations team.

We've been rapidly scaling, and you'll be leading an operations team currently at 10 extremely talented, empathetic, and motivated individuals. You'll be expected to continue to rapidly grow this team as we continue on our journey towards hundreds of thousands, and then millions of customers.

‍The first and most important attribute of this role is empathy - deep empathy for the customer, and even deeper empathy for the team you lead. You'll lead by example here - never asking someone to do something you wouldn't do yourself, and always trying to make sure you understand what's going on in the details of our customer experience.

You'll also need to combine this empathy with incredible ability to hire, develop, and manage your people to continue to build an amazing team and create a world-leading operations working environment.

Finally, you'll bring to this role a relentlessness in problem-solving, a knack for designing robust and efficient processes, and an ability to see around corners over the growth journey of the team and company, and a steadiness to help the team ride out the inevitable bumps along the way. You also have an unlimited curiosity and embrace working at the highest granularity of detail in order to design the right solution.

Outside of your own team, you'll also be a key member of the executive leadership team. We expect this person to be the loudest advocate internally for keeping the rest of the business focused on delivering for customers.

Key Responsibilities

  • Hire, develop, manage and lead our operations team as we continue to scale rapidly. A particular focus here will be on developing the next generation of leaders within the operations team to be awesome managers
  • Define and execute your vision for the organisation structure and working style of the operations team over the scaling journey
  • Lead from the front in terms of empathy for the customer and empathy for your team
  • Build out and grow robust operational processes for the entire customer lifecycle - including transfers in and out, metering requirements, billing and collections, and all the weird and wonderful processes that the electricity industry offers
  • Define and monitor the key KPIs that reflect the experiences that customers are getting with and keep track of the growth of the team's capabilities
  • Lead our key operational relationships with our 3rd party billing system provider and Electricity retailing support partner
  • Working closely with our General Counsel to help implement efficient processes to meet our compliance obligations as an electricity retailer
  • Working closely with our product team to ensure that we are building the right products in the right way for our customers
  • Working closely with our marketing team to manage the overall customer journey an ensure we are promising what we can actually deliver, and then delivering on the promises we make
  • Lead vendor selection process for the key tools we use to get our jobs done as effectively and efficiently as possible
  • Be a key member of the overall executive team leading Amber

About you

  • You've got 8+ years experience working in and leading high-performance, market leading customer operations teams - ideally over a period of rapid growth
  • You have a clear vision for 'What good looks like' in a Customer Operations team, and you know what it takes to get there. You have experience building and rolling out robust processes and systems that work at scale.
  • Experience in electricity retailing is highly valued, alternatively experience in other complex services also valued (e.g. fast growing telco, consumer fintech, etc)
  • Ability to operate at the lowest level of detail - our industry is deeply complex with multiple parties, high levels of physical, regulatory and economic complexity and frequent problems where the answer can only be found by getting deep under the surface to understand the true mechanics of what's going on
  • Extremely strong ability to strategically plan to help find the smoothest way to manage the challenges of rapidly scaling
  • Proven ability to develop people to do their best work, and proven ability to grow managers over multiple years to create the next generation of leaders at Amber
  • Experience working with product teams to help craft technical solutions that meet the needs of customers and the operations team

What we believe a great team looks like

  • We put the customer at the centre of everything we do. Whatever it is we are doing, it’s always with a viewpoint that this will help our customers, whether that’s 1000 customers right now, or 1 million customers over the next 10 years.

  • We are willing to take calculated risks on bold ideas. We seek to do things differently and are willing to try creative ideas if we believe there is significant upside with a culture where we recognise that not all ideas will succeed.

  • Hypothesis driven approach. We develop hypotheses of actions we can take to improve the business and then set up the systems to quickly test if that hypothesis was correct.

  • We seek insight. We seek to disaggregate the data to draw out the insight to inform our next hypothesis.

  • We prioritise the biggest opportunities. We test a variety of ideas but quickly cut what isn’t working and double down on what is.

  • We continually learn and improve. We keep track of what we have learnt so that we continually improve and never make the same mistake twice.

  • We love accountability. We accept responsibility for solving problems, and then we hold ourselves and our teammates accountable for delivering on them.

  • We create leverage. We believe that the key to creating an efficient business at scale is to create leverage in everything we do. Whether that’s implementing a better processes or developing a new technology to solve a problem faster.

  • We have fun. We love coming to work, and interacting with our colleagues and customers. If we spot an opportunity for a joke, or to do something nice for someone, then we take it.

How to apply

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