Director, Founder's Office (Performance)

Location Nine Elms, London | Full-time

The Role

If you have spent your career building high-performance cultures, owning planning cadences, and making organisations genuinely better at executing - keep reading.

Zapp is a lean, fast-moving business with high ambitions and high standards. We are not looking for someone to run HR. We are looking for someone who is obsessed with organisational performance - who understands that the difference between a good company and a great one is almost always the quality of its people systems, its planning discipline, and its culture of accountability.

You will report directly to the Director of Growth and Strategy and work closely with the founder and leadership team. You will be the person who makes Zapp's performance culture real..

What You Will Own

Annual and Quarterly Planning

Own Zapp's planning cadence end to end - annual strategy setting, quarterly OKR design, and the cascade from leadership priorities to individual goals. You will ensure every person in the business understands how their work connects to what the company is trying to achieve commercially.

Performance Reviews and Calibration

Design and run Zapp's performance review and calibration cycles. Honest, rigorous, commercially anchored. You will build the frameworks that make it possible to have direct conversations about who is performing, who is not, and what needs to happen next. You will coach senior leaders through those conversations and ensure the outcomes are acted on.

Operating Model and Organisational Effectiveness

Partner with the founder and leadership team to continuously refine how Zapp is structured and how it operates - identifying where the organisation is losing speed, duplicating effort, or carrying structural drag that does not serve the business at its current stage.

Company All-Hands and Narrative

Own the design and execution of Zapp's all-hands and company-wide moments. Work with the founder and leadership team to translate commercial progress into a story the whole business can feel proud of and aligned behind.

Culture and Leadership Principles

Embed Zapp's Leadership Principles into how people are hired, assessed, promoted, recognised, and transitioned. Build and run the rhythms that make high performance visible - recognition and rewards - and the moments that reinforce what good looks like at Zapp.

EVP and Employer Brand

Define and own what makes Zapp a genuinely compelling place to work - and express it consistently across every candidate and employee touchpoint. Drive Zapp's external employer brand presence across LinkedIn, and represent Zapp publicly as a credible voice on high-performance culture.

Talent and Promotion

Set and hold the bar on how Zapp hires. Own the assessment standard, the candidate experience, and the speed of decision-making. Design and run Zapp's promotion framework - progression that is earned, transparent, and tied to performance rather than tenure or politics.

Who You Are

• You come from a high-performance business environment - consulting, investment banking, a high-growth startup, or a scale-up where the planning and performance bar was genuinely high. You have not spent your career in traditional HR functions.

• You have owned or significantly shaped a planning cadence - annual strategy, OKR design, or performance frameworks - and can point to specific evidence that it changed how people worked.

• You are a credible, confident presence with founders and senior leaders. You give honest counsel, hold your position, and do not need a hierarchy to lean on.

• You are commercially minded. You understand the metrics that drive business performance and you build people systems that serve those metrics.

• You have the external presence and communication skills to represent Zapp publicly and attract exceptional people to the company's story.

• You are comfortable being hands-on. This is a lean team. There is no large function to delegate to.

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.

• Zapp Credit for testing the Zapp service and experience

• Lunch provided 4 days of a week at HQ

• Extended sick pay and maternity/paternity leave pay.

• Cycle to work scheme.

• Flexible/hybrid working arrangement