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Senior Business Operations Lead

Airbnb· Chief Business Officer / UKI, Nordics, Middle East and Africa
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London£126k - £158kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Lead the UKI & Nordics region’s business operations, shaping regional growth strategy, aligning cross-functional teams, and driving sustainable commercial growth across one of Airbnb’s key markets.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 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 (preferred)
  • Experience launching or scaling new products or lines of business in-market (preferred)
  • This role will require to be in the London office 3 days per week.

Skills

Required:Strategy developmentExecutive storytelling and communicationAnalytical & financial analysis
Nice to have:AI tooling fluency

Benefits

  • Base pay range £126,000—£158,000 GBP per year (UK)
  • Bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits (eligible)
  • Reasonable accommodations during recruitment process (accessible hiring)
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Airbnb

Book accommodations around the world.

Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 33,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions. No global movement springs from individuals. It takes an entire team united behind something big. Together, we work hard, we laugh a lot, we brainstorm nonstop, we use hundreds of Post-Its a week, and we give the best high-fives in town. Headquartered in San Francisco, we have satellite offices in Dublin, London, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow, São Paolo, Sydney, and Singapore.

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