Source.One - Operations Lead

Role : Operations Lead

Location : Pune

Department : Operations

Reports to : CEO

Directly manages : A team of 12-15 across Order Success, Transporter Success, and Driver Success.

About Us

Source.One is India's leading zero-inventory distribution platform for industrial raw materials - polymers (~50kt/month), TiO2, solvents, recycled and compounded materials - with more verticals in the pipeline. We buy back-to-back from sellers and sell to buyers on the platform, and are now building the connective tissue - credit, logistics, and technology - that makes this the default way industrial materials get traded in India.

About The Role

We are looking for an Operations Lead to own everything that happens after an order is confirmed - dispatch, transportation, delivery, and reconciliation - across Source.One. The Order Manager function (replacing today's fragmented seller back-office / buyer back-office / transport manager / finance handoffs) is already being redesigned and will largely be in place by the time this person joins.

This role is about running, optimizing, and scaling that function - not designing it from scratch. This is as much a product and process mandate as an operations one. You will lead a 12-15 person team, identify where manual work can be automated, and work directly with product/tech to build those automations.

What You'll Do

• Own post-order-confirmation fulfilment end to end - dispatch coordination, transportation, delivery, and collections - as a single, accountable process. Order confirmation itself sits outside this role.
• Run and continuously improve the Order Manager operating model (already being designed) - refine workflows, SLAs, and handoffs as volumes and verticals grow.
• Lead a 12 -15 person team across three functions: Order Success, Transporter Success, and Driver Success; set standards, coach managers, and own hiring/performance within the team.
• Own transporter/freight operations : Rate discovery, vehicle placement, on-time performance - and work with the transporter network to improve reliability and cost.
• Identify manual, error-prone, or slow steps in the post-order process and drive process automation - partnering closely with Product/Tech to prioritize and ship fixes, not just flag issues.
• Own operational metrics : Dispatch-to-delivery TAT, exceptions/escalations, freight cost per order, transporter and driver reliability, and collections cycle time; report these to leadership regularly.
• Build playbooks and SOPs that let the function scale to 5-10x current order volumes without proportional headcount growth.
  
  

Who You Are

• 6 - 12 years of experience, with meaningful exposure to truck transportation / freight operations (own fleet, brokered, or managed marketplace).
• Experience in at least one of a large-scale trading/commodities distribution company, a Transportation Management System (TMS) business, or a platform/marketplace commerce business with back-to-back (buy-then-sell) order flows.
• Demonstrated product mindset : Comfortable partnering with tech/product teams to translate operational pain points into automated workflows, not just running manual processes better.
• Strong process orientation - has designed or redesigned an operating process from scratch, not just operated within an existing one.
• Proven people leadership : Has built and managed a multi-person ops team, ideally across geographies/functions.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and a high pace of change; this function is being actively redesigned, not inherited as a finished system.
• Bonus: prior exposure to industrial commodities (polymers, chemicals, paper, metals) or B2B fintech/SCF-adjacent operations.
  
  

(ref:iimjobs.com)