Strategy & Operations Senior Associate, Zen Educate
£60-65k
SQL
Junior, Mid and Senior level
London
4+ days a week in office
Education recruitment platform
Open for applications
Education recruitment platform
201-500 employees
B2BMarketplaceEducationRecruitment
Open for applications
£60-65k
SQL
Junior, Mid and Senior level
London
4+ days a week in office
201-500 employees
B2BMarketplaceEducationRecruitment
Company mission
To make a positive impact and bring about meaningful change within the education recruitment sector.
Role
Who you are
- We're looking for someone with a demonstrated record of strong performance who wants to move from advising to owning. This is likely a fit for someone with 2 to 5 years of experience in consulting, private equity, investing, high-growth startups, or another demanding analytical environment. Candidates with strong mathematical ability are preferred
- Genuine analytical horsepower. You will be building models, not commissioning them. Advanced spreadsheet work is a given, and comfort writing SQL is a strong advantage
- The instinct to check what a number is actually measuring before building on it
- The ability to take an ambiguous commercial problem, structure it, and reach a defensible answer quickly
- Credibility with operators: Regional leads and account managers will only use your work if they trust you, and trust here is earned by doing the work, and being humble enough to realise the first cut is rarely perfect
- If this sounds like the right level of exciting, apply! And if you're not sure you tick every box, but this sounds like the kind of work you're built for, reach out anyway
What the job involves
- Zen makes large supply-side decisions every week. These include:
- How many educators to recruit and where
- How much to spend on new leads vs reactivating existing leads
- How to improve our processes to provide candidates a great experiences
- How to make sure all our regions have the liquidity needed to meet the demands of their schools
- All of these decisions are ones which can be improved. This role exists to fix that. You'll own the analysis, and you'll own whether anyone acts on it
- You'll report to the Head of Candidate Success who is deep in these problems and will work on them alongside you. This is a small, senior team with a large remit, which means unusual ownership and no layers between you and the decisions
- Traits that usually correlate with success in this role:
- Relentless drive to deliver outcomes
- Strong analytical judgment
- Clear, logical, compelling communication
- High ownership
- Ability to influence stakeholders
- Excitement to move between analysis and hands-on execution
- Genuine care for the mission
- Our data is not as clean as you will want it to be. Part of your first few months will be establishing what things actually mean before you can model them properly. We would rather tell you that upfront
- You will not have a team. You will have a manager who is deep in the problem, direct access to leadership, and the expectation that you make things happen through other people rather than through headcount
- Your work will change how Zen spends money and where we place people. When it is wrong, that is visible. For the right person, that is very appealing
Salary benchmarks
Our take
With UK schools under immense financial pressure, Zen Educate is providing a smarter approach to education staffing. Recruitment in schools often relies on inefficient and expensive practices. Zen Educate is focused on tackling the pain points in the industry and providing a way to ensure schools get the best teachers possible.
It provides an online platform as an alternative to recruitment agencies, which is the only online platform accredited by the UK's Department of Education, helping schools fill staffing needs quickly and cost-effectively. Schools using the platform have reportedly saved 20-30% on supply cover costs.
On top of this, the company has also raised significant funding to support acquisitions in the UK and the US, plus the expansion of its operations and offering.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2025
$17.7m
SERIES B
May 2024
$37m
SERIES B
Total funding: $103.4m
Company benefits
- Macbook and tech equipment provided
- Regular "lunch 'n' learns" every month on a range of topics
- Investment in your professional development
- Regular socials
- Ownership in the company
- Pension scheme
- 25 days of holidays + all UK public holidays off
- Central London dog-friendly office with perks like fresh fruit, bike parking, showers, and an on-site gym and café
- Life insurance
- Vitality health insurance and benefits
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Electric Car Scheme
Company values
- Commit to the mission- We commit to our mission, our customers, and our teams. We work hard because we care more
- Choose greatness over comfort- Greatness and comfort rarely coexist. We seek greatness. We understand success takes grit & determination so we seek colleagues that possess it
- Act like an owner- We all take responsibility for driving the company forward and making it a success. If we see something that could be better, we fix it. We offer stock options to all employees
- Help each other be better- Every person at Zen is someone we can respect and learn from
- A culture of trust- We hire people who are great at their jobs and we let them get on with it while being there to lend a hand when needed
- Challenge the status quo- We take action when we can see opportunities for improvement. We are in it to make our customers' lives better and to fix a broken system
- Embrace learning over perfection- We make decisions quickly and we don't hesitate. We may disagree with a decision, but we support the team and the mission by committing to it. We embrace making unknowable mistakes and learning from them
Company HQ
HQ, London
Articles
Leadership
Slava Kremerman
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a member of the Leadership Team at Nutmeg a FS startup, they also worked at Barclays and Aon.
Oren Cohen
(Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer)Ran the UK office of Optimizely, a Silicon Valley tech company. Prior to this, they worked at G-STAT and Intel.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Zen Educate
- At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all
- We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives — just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work
- We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we’ve had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team
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