Senior Business Operations Lead

Who you are

• 12+ years in business operations, strategy, consulting, or commercial leadership, with a track record of owning outcomes in a market or business unit
• Demonstrated ability to set strategy and drive it through to execution
• Deep experience influencing without authority across a global matrixed organisation
• Strong analytical toolkit; comfortable working with finance and data science partners and interrogating the numbers yourself
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, with executive presence in front of senior leadership
• Comfort with ambiguity, and a strong bias toward action and ownership
• Practical fluency with AI tools and a view on where they change how a team operates
• Familiarity with the UKI and/or Nordic markets, or comparable mature-market experience
• Experience in a two-sided marketplace, travel/hospitality, or consumer tech
• Experience launching or scaling new products or lines of business in-market

What the job involves

• The Chief Business Officer organization drives company-wide growth and global expansion
• This is the role that turns Airbnb's ambition for the UKI & Nordics into a plan and holds the organisation to delivering it: shaping strategy, aligning cross-functional teams, and driving sustainable commercial growth across one of our most important regions
• This includes recruiting and supporting high-quality Stays, Experiences, and Services, alongside executing Airbnb’s global market strategy
• Shaping business approaches, quality supply sourcing, and international growth efforts are integral to the team’s success in connecting millions more hosts and guests to Airbnb's platform
• You will join the UKI, Nordics, Middle East and Africa team, covering one of Airbnb’s largest and most mature markets alongside five of Europe’s most digitally advanced, high-trust travel markets
• The UK offers scale, brand strength, and a sophisticated regulatory environment; the Nordics offer strong domestic travel behaviour and significant headroom for growth. Together they make this one of the most commercially interesting regions in EMEA to build in
• You will own the business operations agenda for the UKI and Nordics. Airbnb’s most established European market alongside five high-potential Nordic markets (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland)
• Partnering closely with the Country Manager, you will set the regional growth strategy, translate it into a plan cross-functional teams can execute against, and run the operating rhythm that keeps it on track
• This is a high-visibility role: your influence will come from the quality of your thinking and your ability to mobilise teams to grow further
• Own the UKI & Nordics growth strategy end to end: define where the region should compete, what it should stop doing, and the handful of bets that will move guest nights, supply growth, and revenue
• Build the annual and quarterly plan with the Country Manager, sizing opportunities and making explicit recommendations on where to deploy marketing spend, supply investment, and partnership effort
• Set and pressure-test the region’s targets, translating global goals into market-level commitments that supply, marketing, partnerships, policy, and product teams can own
• Run deep-dive analyses on demand and supply dynamics, competitive movements, pricing, and seasonality, turning each into a clear recommendation, not just a read-out
• Identify and stand up new growth initiatives, using the UK as a test market for offerings that can then scale across EMEA, and the Nordics as a proving ground for high-penetration, low-friction market plays
• Build the case for investment in the region: sizing, business case, and the socialisation needed to win resource in global planning cycles
• Own the region’s operating cadence: weekly, monthly, and quarterly business reviews, so leadership has a single, trusted view of performance and the story behind it
• Convert strategy into sequenced execution plans with named owners, milestones, and success measures across supply, marketing, partnerships, policy, and product
• Track delivery against the plan, surfacing risks and bottlenecks early and driving them to resolution rather than escalating them
• Design and continuously improve the operating processes the region runs on, raising the bar on efficiency, transparency, and decision speed
• Lead the region’s input into global planning and resource allocation cycles
• Act as the connective tissue between the UKI & Nordics team and global functions such as Product, Marketing, Communications, Policy, Finance, Data Science, Legal, and Community Support
• Be the go-to decision partner alongside the Country Manager: the person other teams come to for the region’s position, context, and priorities
• Build alignment on high-priority projects, market launches, and product tests, brokering trade-offs between global consistency and local market reality
• Represent UKI & Nordics in NEMEA and global business operations forums, and bring the best of what other markets are doing back into the region
• Partner with Public Policy on the regulatory landscape, including short-term let rules in the UKI and Nordic city regulation so commercial plans account for policy risk and opportunity
• Turn complex data into clear narratives that help leadership decide with a recommendation attached
• Build the reporting layer the region relies on: dashboards, performance packs, and executive materials, working with a dedicated analyst
• Establish the metrics that matter for the region and hold the team to a shared definition of success
• Champion data-driven decision-making, and use AI tooling to compress the time from question to insight. Automating recurring analysis and reporting so the team spends its time on judgement, not assembly

Benefits

• Paid volunteer time
• Health food and snacks
• Generous parental and family leave
• Learning and development
• Annual travel and experiences credit