Operations Strategy Lead, Global

Koala

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Koala is a global furniture brand bringing Australian design and innovation to the world. We create forward-thinking products that solve problems for people and homes everywhere, driven by our purpose to make the world a more comfortable place. We’ve always believed in doing things differently, whether in the way we develop products, how we do people and culture, or the way we bring the brand to life. That mindset has fuelled our growth, helping us disrupt categories in ways that are creative, bold and often unexpected. While we’re a household name in Australia, our journey on the global stage is only just beginning. Since launching in 2015, our furniture has reached homes across Australia, Japan, the US and the UK. As a B Corp-certified, customer-obsessed, and data-led company, we’re committed to revolutionising furniture for generations to come through design, innovation, and meaningful sustainability. Role Description We’re building something at a genuinely critical moment. We need someone who can think like a CEO, execute like a founder, and make the COO twice as effective. This isn’t a project management job. It’s not a strategy consultant’s secondment. This is one of the highest-leverage roles in the company. You take our biggest, most complex operational priorities, international expansion, global fulfilment and customer experience at scale, and drive them to board-ready recommendation to real world delivery. You’ll go deep where the COO can’t, build the commercial case for action and push it through the teams that actually ship it. Success means the COO's reach and output doubles. If this sounds like a lot of responsibility, it is. But if you’re the right person, it’ll also be the most exciting job you’ve ever had.

Requirements

Roughly 7+ years of experience and a clear record of turning strategy into real measurable outcomes.
Operating role, not an advisory one: a strategy or consulting grounding is a great foundation, but we are looking for someone who can has since can be in-house and drive real outcomes, not a pure consultant.
Physical operations experience (critical). You have worked inside a business that moves physical product (ecommerce preferred) and owned/co-owned the operational metrics that matter: fulfillment, cost-to-serve, delivery performance, inventory, customer experience and the post-purchase journey.
Understand supply chain, logistics, and 3PLs from the inside.
Genuine financial and commercial firepower: financial modelling, unit economics, and a data-driven instinct for cost.
Comfortable owning a business case end to end, running scenario analysis, and quantifying margin and OPEX impact down to cost-per-order.
Ability to turn ambiguity into structure.
Sizing opportunities, pressure-testing them, and producing the analysis that takes a hypothesis to a clear go/no-go for the COO and exec team.
Build the dashboards and metrics that give leadership a real-time read on performance.
Ability to see how operations actually run, find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and redesign workflows for speed and scale.
Design networks and footprints that hold up as the business grows.
A formative grounding in structured problem-solving, likely from early years in strategy, consulting, or corporate strategy.
Hands-on with Claude and the next generation of AI and agentic tools.
Willingness to tear down and redesign systems, and bring others with you.
Write with clarity, build board- and exec-grade materials, and can distill complexity into a decision in one page.
Move things forward in ambiguity, hold people accountable with warmth, and don't wait to be told what matters.
Willingness to challenge and round out others' strategies, not just own your own patch.
Proven physical operations experience, real commercial and analytical rigour, AI-native ways of working, and the agency to get hands-on across fulfilment, expansion, and cost.

Nice To Haves

Ecommerce preferred
A strategy background helps; on its own, it is not enough.

Responsibilities

Develop and own global and local operations and fulfillment strategy.
Build strategic distribution models that balance customer experience, growth ambitions, delivery models and cost optimisation to achieve our global goals.
Make the trade-offs explicit (modelling how speed, cost and footprint play against each other so leadership can choose deliberately) and design the inventory and network footprint that scales with growth.
Working in parallel with the Global Fulfilment Lead and local teams, pressure-test and round out their strategies, providing the models, business cases and decision support that turn strategy into action.
End to end order to return customer experience, leverage data, AI, move us to use data to find the highest-leverage CX improvements across the post-purchase and delivery journey, build the case for change, and drive the cross-functional work to ship them.
Lead the analysis and go-to-market groundwork for operational launches into new markets.
Develop short, fast and flexible entry strategies with meaningful paths to optimised mid-term structures across supply chain, logistics and operational teams.
Assist in selecting and managing local partners (3PLs, distributors, suppliers).
Identify, size, and pressure-test growth and operational opportunities across markets and functions.
Build the data models, market analyses, and unit economics that turn a hypothesis into a clear go/no-go recommendation for the COO and exec team.
Own the end-to-end business case for major initiatives, financial modelling, scenario analysis, risk assessment, and the investment narrative.
Translate complex operational and commercial trade-offs into crisp, decision-ready recommendations.
Drive priority projects through to delivery by working hand-in-hand with operational, supply chain, commercial, and CX teams.
Set milestones, unblock cross-functional friction, hold owners accountable, and report progress against outcomes.
Bring a strong commercial lens to every decision, margin, cost-to-serve, payback, and trade-offs.
Build and maintain the operational dashboards and metrics that give the COO a real-time read on performance.
Prepare board, exec, and leadership materials; run the operating cadence (planning, reviews, prioritisation) for the COO's remit; and represent the COO's priorities in forums where the COO can't be present.

Benefits

Hybrid working
Generous time off - volunteer, parental, Koala life leave and more
Fully stocked kitchen with an emphasis on healthy local produce, think bougie brekky, salad bar, kombucha on tap, monthly barbies and more.
Pet-friendly
Free Koala products with ‘mates rates’ for your friends and fam.
Employee Assistance Program, which includes unlimited sessions for financial, work, relationship, family or wellbeing support.
Learning Management platform Juno
Individual and team growth budgets and dedicated days.
BCorp Certified
WWF Partnership
Volunteer days
Member of SoftLanding
1% and so much more.