Chief Operating Officer
TLDR
Lead the transformation of operational systems at Plenit to enable sustainable growth and efficiency in a multi-country setting while maintaining a strong company culture.
About this role
The challenge
We are looking for our Chief Operating Officer — the leader who will rebuild the operating system of Plenit, formerly Jotelulu, so that growth, partner experience, and team velocity keep compounding through our next stage. You will report to the CEO, sit on the Executive Committee, and be the partner the rest of the leadership team turns to when a decision needs to get made and an execution plan needs to ship.
This is not a coordination role. It is an ownership role. The things that worked at 30 people are quietly breaking at 130 — and will silently kill Jotelulu at 300 if no one rebuilds them in time. You will redesign how we plan, decide, measure, and run the company across four markets and our own infrastructure, so we are ready for the next 170 hires before they arrive.
This is a hands-on role. You will sit with partners, with country teams, with engineers in the data center, and with the CFO closing the books. You will spend more time fixing things than presenting about them.
Expected outcomes and impact
- Own the operating system of the company: planning rhythm (annual, quarterly, weekly), decision-making forums, executive cadences, and the metrics that matter — NRR, partner cohorts by vintage and market, gross margin, operating efficiency.
- Redesign the company structure for 300 people, then for 600, before either number arrives. Make the org chart serve the strategy, not the other way around.
- Be accountable for gross margin and operating efficiency at a P&L level. Industrialize the 20% of work that creates 80% of partner value, and cut the rest.
- Make multi-country execution boring. We operate in Spain, Portugal, France, and Mexico, each one led by a Country Manager running a real local team on top of our own infrastructure. You own the operating model behind it, so the same partner gets the same quality of service in Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, or Querétaro — and you own the playbook to open the next ones: support the market research decision-making, market entry, initial setup, hiring the first local team, and getting to operational steady state without reinventing the wheel each time.
- Be accountable for the reliability our partners trust their business to: uptime of our sovereign cloud, security posture, incident response, and business continuity. In numbers, not narratives.
- Build a finance and ops stack that closes the books in a week, forecasts cash with two-week precision, and gives the CEO and the board a single source of truth.
- Partner with the People function to design org structures, lead workforce planning, and ensure the culture scales with the business, while hiring, developing, and raising the bar of the leaders who report into you, with the honesty to make the hard call when someone is no longer the right fit
- Be the person every functional leader calls when a decision is stuck — and unstick it the same day. Move us from “committee created” to “friction removed.”
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, GTM, and Finance to translate strategy into execution and execution into measurable outcomes.
- Embody Day 1 every day: speed of a 50-person company at the size of 500, allergy to status meetings without decisions, bias for two-way doors and reversible calls.
Requirements that are important for us
- 10+ years of experience in B2B technology, with a meaningful portion of that time in operating roles (COO, VP Operations, GM, or equivalent) at a high-growth software, cloud, or platform company.
- Proven track record scaling a B2B company, in more than one country.
- Direct experience rebuilding a company at least once between 100 and 500 people, without breaking the speed or the culture that made it work in the first place.
- Strong commercial and financial fluency: you can read a P&L the way most people read a tweet, and you have owned operational KPIs and gross margin at a board level.
- Proven leader of leaders: you have hired, developed, and made hard people calls at director and VP level, and the leadership teams you have built have outperformed.
- Fluent Spanish and professional working English.
Nice to have
- Experience scaling a cloud, SaaS, or platform business from early-stage into category leadership.
- Multi-country operating experience across Europe, including comfort operating across LATAM time zones and cultures. Bonus if you have opened a new country from scratch — entity setup, first local hires, and getting to revenue.
- A view on agentic AI in operations: how to use it to remove work, not to add headcount.
- Operator mindset: comfortable owning P&L, forecasting accurately, and making trade-offs between growth and efficiency without flinching.
Jotelulu builds a self-managed cloud infrastructure platform tailored specifically for small and medium-sized enterprises in the IT sector. By forging strategic alliances with managed service providers and IT integrators, we enhance collaborative revenue generation and provide tools that streamline IT management and automation at scale. Our focus on the Portuguese IT market sets us apart as a dedicated partner to drive growth in this niche.