1000+ Best ceo Jobs in United Kingdom (May 2026) - page 5

International Expansion Lead

5 days ago

City of London

International Expansion Lead You’ve watched a launch go wrong before. Six months in, the numbers stop matching the deck. The local team is asking for things London promised but cannot deliver. The trading meeting that started as a sharp ninety minutes has become a two-hour status update. The partner who was going to anchor the market has gone quiet. You did not write a memo about it. You went and started fixing it. Because the gap between the launch plan and the operating reality only ever closes when somebody refuses to let it stay open. That instinct is the one thing this role is for. Healf is Europe’s fastest-growing company. Number one on the FT1000, number one on the Sifted 100. From £1m to over £100m in under three years, with a small, talent-dense team and an electric culture with day one founder intensity. Now we’re aiming for £1bn in the next three. We curate the world’s best wellbeing brands across The Four Pillars™: EAT, MOVE, MIND, SLEEP. That’s the first chapter. The next chapter is harder and more interesting. We are moving from one market to many, from e-commerce to a technology platform, and from curating wellbeing to defining it. We are a health company, so we think we should act like one. At its fullest expression, Healf redefines what wellbeing means for tens of millions of people. Why this role is Healf There is no single role at Healf with more leverage than this one. Most consumer companies expand by localising. Country manager, local budget, trust them to figure it out. It works at small scale and collapses at speed. Five mediocre markets, a head office that cannot say what is happening in any of them, a company that has stopped learning from its own expansion. Healf is making a different bet. The question this role exists to answer is whether you can centralise the operating engine while keeping the credibility layer local, in a category where credibility is everything. Brand partners, performance marketing, ops, tech, finance all run from London. Local markets own brand, customer obsession, and cultural relevance. Nothing else. The operating engine industrialised. The credibility layer protected. Wellness lives or dies on local trust signals (practitioners, evidence, integration with national health norms), and Healf wins by being the operator that figures out how to scale the engine without flattening the credibility. This is not a system we already run. This is the bet this role exists to prove. You are not running international expansion. You are building Healf in a box, the operating system that proves the bet, market after market. This is not a country manager role. The Brand Manager in Germany owns the local market. Country managers will own future launches. Your job is bigger and earlier in the chain. You build the system they all operate inside. Germany is the first market under this model. Europe, the Middle East, and Asia follow rapidly thereafter. Everything after Germany is the playbook you build the first time around. What you will own → The international P&L. Revenue, margin, CAC, LTV, contribution margin, cash flow. You hold it. You run the weekly trading meeting and you make sure the meeting actually decides things. You ask central teams the questions they would rather not answer. You identify risk before it shows up in the numbers and you fix it before it does. → Everything that has to work, works. This role is full-stack on the market. Market access, regulatory, compliance, operations, supply chain, customer acquisition, retention. You don’t necessarily build every part yourself but you own whether all of it lands together. The unsexy work where most launches actually fail is yours. So is the front-end work where the P&L gets made. Healf doesn’t show up properly in a country unless you make sure it does. → The central versus local line. The operating engine industrialised in London. The credibility layer protected and owned in market. You draw the line, defend it, and rewrite it when a market proves you wrong. The first version will be wrong somewhere. You find where, and you rebuild faster than competitors. The brand partner network is Healf’s deepest moat (no country team could replicate the curation), and you keep that advantage central while still letting local credibility breathe. → The trading rhythm that makes central faster than local. Centralised models fail because they make local feel slow. The trading rhythm is what makes central feel like local. Weekly meetings that drive decisions in hours. Reporting that reaches the CEO before it reaches a finance team six time zones away. Escalation paths that work at founder pace. → The market sequencing strategy. Which markets, in what order, triggered by what criteria. You build the framework that turns expansion from a series of one-off decisions into a system that compounds. You report to the CEO. You partner closely with the Germany Brand Manager, the central function leads in London, and the CFO. What you will have built in a year → Germany operating profitably and proving the central versus local bet → A documented playbook that turns market launch from a six-month exercise into a structured 60-day process → A trading rhythm and reporting framework that makes international P&L performance as visible to leadership as the UK → An architecture that has survived contact with three different markets, not one → Market sequencing decisions for the next three years backed by data, not instinct → An expansion engine the next country lead plugs into rather than builds from scratch How fast? Germany hitting the milestones that prove the model is working before most companies would have finished the market entry plan. Why you’re Healf You are a ruthless executor. Hands dirty. Religious about execution. The thing you are proudest of from your last few years is not a strategy you wrote. It is something that exists in the world because you refused to let it not exist. You build before the meeting about the build is finished. You move central teams who do not report to you. Not by hierarchy. Not by performance. By being relentless about the thing that needs to happen, removing the excuses, and following up until it is done. People deliver for you because you do not let go of the thing. You are commercial first. You read a P&L the way a musician reads a score. You can look at a market’s unit economics and know within an hour whether the model is working, breaking, or pretending. You think in unit economics, not narratives. You love the grind. Not in the way people on LinkedIn say they do. The grind of international expansion is full-stack and unglamorous. Time-zone calls. Days on the ground in markets nobody wants to fly to in February. Reading regulatory filings on a Sunday because it is the unsexy work nobody else will do that decides whether the launch happens on time. Weeks where the work is following up on the same item with five different people until somebody owns it. You have a track record of doing this kind of work and not resenting it. You move at founder pace. International expansion is famously slow. You think most of the slowness is people, process, or politics, and you are impatient with all three. You have scars. From a launch that broke six months in. From a market you sequenced wrong. From a central function that promised and didn’t deliver. You earned them by doing the work and you carry them as the most useful part of your CV. This is the closest thing to running your own company without spending years raising. You own the P&L, you make the calls, you build the system, inside a company that is already winning. If you wanted to be a CEO, this is the seat that gets you there fastest, with the most learning and the least time spent on things that are not the work. Healf is your identity expressed as a company. Wellbeing is personal for you. Applying operator instinct to a category you actually care about feels obvious. Signals we’re looking for → A market launch you led or were on the bridge for. What did you build, what did you not build, and what surprised you? → A central versus local decision you made that other people would have made differently. Why was your call right? Or what did being wrong teach you? → Something hard you got done in international expansion that nobody else was going to get done. What was it, why did nobody else do it, and what did it cost you? → Evidence you have run something full-stack on the ground in a market: regulatory, compliance, ops, and the front end, end to end. → Why this category, this market, this moment? The deal Competitive base plus meaningful equity for the right person. We ask a great deal of the people who work here. We expect full ownership and a genuine commitment to give this chapter everything you have. In return, we will give you the same: everything we have, invested in your growth, your wellbeing, and the defining skills of the next decade. We have built the fastest-growing company in Europe with a team small enough that every person in it shapes the outcome. That is still true today. The next person we hire will change the trajectory of the company. If the most important work of your career is ahead of you, this is the place to do it. One question Include your answer in your CV or cover letter attachment when you apply. The bet this role exists to prove: that Healf can centralise the operating engine while keeping the credibility layer local, in a category where credibility is everything. Where do you draw the line? What stays central, what stays local across the full stack of getting a market live (regulatory, compliance, ops, front end), and what is the first thing that will break the architecture if you get it wrong? 300 words. Plain English. No decks. Show us how you think.

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