COO Job Description for a Scale-Up: A Copy-Ready Template, With Stage-by-Stage Variants

Copy the template below if you need a COO advert live by the end of the week, but read the section after it before you post, because a COO job description for a scale up that is written for the wrong stage attracts exactly the wrong people, and you will not find out until they have been in the seat for six months. What follows is the specification we would have wanted to read when we were the ones being hired, written out in full so that you can lift it, followed by three variants, because the role at 30 people bears little resemblance to the role at 120 or the role the week after an investor joins your board.

If you have not yet settled whether you need a COO at all, the questions in when to hire a COO are worth answering first, since a well-written advert for a role you do not need is still an expensive mistake.

The core COO job description template

Replace the bracketed text, keep the structure, and resist the temptation to add responsibilities until the list reads like a wish list.

About the role

[Company] is a [number]-person technology services business that has grown faster than its operating model. We are hiring a Chief Operating Officer to take ownership of how the business delivers, runs and scales, so that growth no longer depends on the founder being involved in every decision. You will report to the CEO, sit on the leadership team, and have real authority over delivery, resourcing, operational finance and internal systems.

Reporting lines

• Reports to: CEO and founder, with a standing line to the board on operational performance.
• Direct reports: Head of Delivery, Resourcing or PMO lead, Operations and People Operations lead, and a dotted line to the Finance Director on margin and forecasting.
• Peers: CEO, CTO or technical lead, and the commercial lead.

Key responsibilities

• Own delivery performance across all client work, including margin, utilisation, on-time delivery and escalation handling.
• Design and run the operating cadence of the business: weekly operational reviews, monthly performance reviews and quarterly planning.
• Define and document decision rights, so that the leadership team knows which decisions it owns without routing them to the founder.
• Build resourcing and capacity planning that connects pipeline to hiring, so that the business neither carries an expensive bench nor turns down work it could have delivered.
• Establish the management information the leadership team and board need, from project-level margin to a forward view of capacity.
• Develop the second line of leadership, coaching delivery and operations managers into people who can run their areas without supervision.
• Lead operational readiness for larger contracts, including governance, security and compliance requirements that bigger clients now expect.

First-year objectives

1. Within 90 days, complete an operational diagnosis and agree three or four priorities with the CEO and board.
2. Within six months, have a documented decision-rights framework in use and a weekly operating cadence running without the founder chairing it.
3. Within nine months, deliver project-level margin reporting that the leadership team trusts and acts on.
4. Within twelve months, have delivery and operations leads who own their numbers, and a founder who is no longer the escalation route for routine delivery issues.

Measurable KPIs

What we are looking for

Someone who has run operations in a services business of a comparable size, who has taken a team from founder-led to leader-led before, who is comfortable with numbers and uncomfortable with ambiguity about who owns what, and who would rather implement a change and see it hold than write a report recommending one.

Three variants by stage

Generic templates fail because they describe one role when there are really three, each of which calls for a different person, a different reporting relationship and a different measure of success.

20 to 60 people: the builder

At this stage the COO is building the operating model rather than running one, which means the advert should stress hands-on delivery ownership, first-time process design and a willingness to chair the weekly delivery meeting personally. Weight the KPIs towards margin and founder escalations, cut the board reporting line, and be honest that the direct reports may not exist yet. Many businesses at this size are better served by fractional support than a full-time hire, a trade-off set out in fractional COO vs full-time COO.

60 to 150 people: the scaler

Here the COO manages managers, so the specification should shift from doing to designing and delegating, with responsibilities centred on the operating cadence, a second line of leadership and cross-team resourcing. The KPIs move towards forecast accuracy and the share of decisions made below leadership level, and the candidate profile should require previous experience of a business this size, not merely ambition to reach it.

Post-investment: the institutional operator

Once an investor is on the board, the COO answers to two audiences, and the advert should say so plainly, adding board reporting, value creation plan delivery and readiness for due diligence to the responsibilities. The KPIs become the ones in the investment case, and the candidate needs experience of reporting to a board that asks harder questions than a founder does.

Salary and equity: how to set them

We have deliberately not printed salary figures here, because the numbers we use across the site live in our research on fractional executive rates in the UK, and a full-time package should be benchmarked against that and against current market data rather than a figure quoted in a template. The structural norms are more stable: base salary rises with each stage, a bonus tied to the KPIs above is standard, and equity or options are expected at every stage but matter most in the builder role, where the base is typically lower relative to the risk the candidate is taking.

The mistakes founders make in COO adverts

The glorified operations manager

An advert full of office management, supplier contracts and HR administration will attract an operations manager, which is a perfectly good hire but not a COO, and the capable candidates will read it as a signal that the founder intends to keep every real decision.

The co-founder without the equity

Asking for someone to "act like a co-founder" while offering a standard options pool is a request candidates recognise instantly, and the ones who accept tend to leave once they work out the arithmetic.

The role that is really a chief of staff

If the job is mainly running the founder's agenda and chasing actions, you are describing a different role, and the distinction explained in chief of staff vs COO will save you a mismatched hire and a difficult conversation you would rather avoid.

Authority left unstated

An advert that lists responsibilities without saying which decisions the COO owns attracts candidates who are comfortable without authority, which is not the trait you are hiring for.

Where Vitori fits

A good advert and a good hire will solve this for many businesses, and if that is the path you take, whether with Vitori's input or anyone else's, the template above is yours to use. Where we help is the stage before the hire or in place of it: using the Operational Scale Framework to establish which of the three roles you actually need, or embedding through our Operator model as fractional leadership to build the operating model so that a permanent COO inherits something that works. It is not the right answer to every situation, but where it fits, the aim is the same one this role exists for: a business that runs, and scales, without the founder in every decision.