Major events manager jobs in Oxford, oxfordshire

Role Purpose

This role is at the heart of Child Bereavement UK’s identity, leading the strategy and delivery of our brand across the organisation to ensure we are recognised as the UK’s leading bereavement charity for children, young people and parents. You will champion our brand, supporting teams across all departments to apply it consistently, creatively and confidently, strengthening trust, recognition, and impact.

As the guardian of our brand, you will develop, protect, and embed our identity, ensuring all organisational output is clear, inclusive, and aligned with our values. You will also identify high-impact brand collaboration opportunities to enhance our reputation and drive recognition, building strong relationships both internally and externally to maximise our brand influence.

In this role, you will combine strategic vision with hands-on guidance, enabling teams to live our brand with confidence while positioning Child Bereavement UK as a bold, trusted, and inspiring voice in the sector.

Main Responsibilities

 Brand strategy and positioning

· Lead the development and ongoing evolution of the Child Bereavement UK brand strategy, ensuring it is audience driven and reflects our purpose, values and strategic priorities.

· Collaborate with audiences to ensure brand components and their application are stakeholder evidenced and driven.

· Define and maintain clear brand positioning, messaging and tone of voice for key audiences.

· Conduct regular brand research and use insight and research to ensure the brand remains relevant, credible and distinctive.

Brand governance and quality

· Own, maintain and embed brand guidelines, ensuring consistent application across campaigns, communications, fundraising and digital activity.

· Organise, manage and proactively update the Child Bereavement UK brand asset and photo libraries by sourcing and organising new commissions.

· Provide advice, guidance and sign-off on high-profile or high-risk brand outputs.

· Support teams to use the brand well, balancing consistency with flexibility and creativity.

· Work closely with marketing, communications and fundraising colleagues to help shape campaign narratives, key messages and offer creative direction that align with brand principles.

· Ensure messaging and visual identity are aligned and coherent across channels.

· Contribute to creative briefs and support the development of compelling, audience-focused storytelling.

· Support the content and marketing teams with the development of branded content as required including but not limited to graphic design, filming, editing and copywriting.

Brand collaboration

· Identify, develop and nurture brand collaborations that strengthen awareness, credibility and reach, and align with the organisation’s purpose and values.

· Act as a brand advisor in discussions, ensuring opportunities are strategically aligned and reputationally sound.

· Work with colleagues to ensure brand collaborations are coherent, well-governed and mutually beneficial, with clear messaging and visual alignment.

· Support the development of collaboration narratives, co-branded materials and storytelling that reflect shared values and objectives.

Internal brand leadership

· Act as an internal champion for the brand, helping staff and volunteers understand and apply it in their day-to-day work.

· Deliver brand training, resources and guidance as needed.

· Create and deliver communications to ensure the brand is reflected consistently in how the organisation presents itself internally.

Design

· Own the creation and evolution of core evergreen brand assets, ensuring the Child Bereavement purpose, values, and visual identity are consistently and clearly expressed.

· Be the senior authority for design standards and frameworks.

· Support marketing colleagues to confidently create short-form, campaign, and project materials providing guidance, tools and access to approved freelance designers where needed.

· Focus brand design resource on high-value, long-term assets, avoiding unnecessary centralisation of short-term or one-off materials in order to reduce bottlenecks and keep work moving at pace.

· Manage and maintain relationships with approved design freelancers and agencies.

Insight, performance and reputation

· Monitor brand health, awareness and perception, using insight to inform decisions and improvements.

· Work closely with marketing and communications colleagues on reputation management and sensitive issues.

· Stay informed about sector trends, public expectations and best practice in brand management.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

· Work closely with the Directors of Marketing & Communications, Services & Service Transformation, and Income Generation to deliver strategic brand strategies.

· Foster strong cross-charity relationships to ensure coherent and consistent branded output and shared learning.

Person Specification

Essential

Experience & Knowledge

· A proven track record of success in leading and/or managing an organisation’s brand activity and maintaining a high-quality brand portfolio.

· Experience of communicating and implementing a brand across an organisation.

· Proven experience and confidence of brand guardianship and developing and implementing brand guidelines.

· The ability to lead, enthuse and inspire colleagues at all levels to be brand guardians and support brand and marketing activities.

· Strong understanding of how brand shows up across the full customer journey.

· Strong understanding of audience insight, segmentation and customer needs.

· The ability to provide clear, professional and well-reasoned brand feedback on a wide range of creative and content.

· Experience of collaborating with audiences to develop brand plans and assets.

· Experience of using insight, analytics, testing and research to develop and inform decision-making.

Skills

· Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

· Strong graphic design and video editing skills (e.g. Canva, Adobe, CapCut).

· Meticulous attention to detail.

· Ability to translate business goals into clear brand positioning and direction.

· Strong analytical thinking, using insight and data to inform decisions.

· Excellent creative judgement across visual identity, tone of voice and storytelling.

· Ability to brief, evaluate and elevate creative work.

· Strong project management skills and the ability to prioritise workload.

· Ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously.

· Ability to balance long-term brand building with short term performance needs.

· Ability to work collaboratively and bring colleagues on board a brand journey.

· Ability to demonstrate initiative and to work proactively and independently.

· Ability to work well under pressure.

Attributes & Values

· Compassion, emotional intelligence and ability to work respectfully with bereaved children, young people and families.

· Collaborative, approachable, and able to build trust across teams.

· Creative, innovative and proactive, with a solutions-focused, self-starter mindset.

· Customer-centric mindset, grounded in audience insight.

· Highly organised, resilient and able to work independently in a remote environment.

· Strong commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion and ethical storytelling, including amplifying lived experience safely and respectfully.

· Willingness to undertake relevant training and development opportunities.

· Willingness to work flexibly to meet organisational need.

· Ability to undertake periodic UK travel and represent the charity at meetings and events.

Desirable

· Previous experience in a Brand Lead or similar role.

· Experience working within the charity/third sector, particularly in bereavement, mental health or social care.

· Understanding of bereavement and the needs of bereaved children, young people and parents.

· Experience contributing to or leading the development of brand strategy including positioning, purpose and key messaging frameworks

· Experience leading a rebrand or major brand evolution including repositioning, visual identity refreshes or large-scale brand rollouts.

· Exposing adapted brand strategy across multi audiences.

· Knowledge of brand tracking, perception research and audience insight tools.

· Strong understanding of digital-first branding including expressing brands across digital products, platforms and social channels.

· Familiarity with CRM systems such as Salesforce.

Benefits

· 28 days’ holiday plus bank holidays (pro rata if applicable) with increase for long service.

· TOIL for our hours work.

· Contributory pension scheme.

· Company sick pay.

· Employee Assistance Programme.

· Life assurance.

· Training loans.

· Enhanced family friendly policies.

Recruitment Timetable

Application deadline: 6th July 2026 at midnight

We reserve the right to close the vacancy early if we receive a high number of applications for the role before the closing date.

Interviews

If you are progressed to an interview, you will be invited to attend a 1-hour competency-based interview on MS Teams with the Hiring Managers for the role. You may also be asked to complete an interview task, which will also be shared with you in advance.

Proposed interview dates: 20th and 21st July 2026.

Platform Engineer

Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Salary: £71,043 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)

• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact

• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

�� About the Role

We've built a lot, fast. Now we want to make it last.

As a young organisation, we've used modern technology to move quickly and get remarkable products into teachers' hands. We've proven what's possible. Now we're maturing, making sure the foundations are as strong as what's built on top of them. We see this role as central to that change.

You'll work with engineering, product, and research colleagues to build confidence in using observability principles that deepen our understanding of how teachers and pupils use our products, and help us keep improving them. We work in product squads alongside designers, researchers, and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements so teachers and pupils get quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.

Alongside other members of the platform engineering group, you'll enable squads to move more quickly by optimising tooling and implementing automations, including the effective and safe use of AI. You'll drive the creation and adoption of engineering standards across code, deployment, security, observability, and monitoring. And you'll be a key driver of automation, working with the rest of the platform team to improve the overall developer experience.

You'll need a good understanding of platform engineering in a SaaS-heavy environment and the value it brings to an organisation. A solid grounding in development practices, security fundamentals, and infrastructure operation matters. But specific technical skills are less important to us than a passion for automation, an ability to understand complex systems, and a pragmatic engineering approach.

As part of the Oak team, you'll contribute to the wider success and culture of the organisation, and support and role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.

��What you'll be doing:

• Leading continuous improvement of the observability, performance, and reliability of our web applications (Next.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node) and serverless functions (Google Cloud Functions, Cloudflare), deployed on Vercel and Cloudflare

• Helping teams maintain high service quality by promoting a culture of quality across engineering and product, and enabling squads to use SLOs and SLAs effectively

• Contributing to the strategy and evolution of our monitoring, logging, and reporting solutions so developers can resolve problems quickly and get meaningful insights into application behaviour

• Identifying and implementing automations that speed up development, improve security, or raise the quality of what we deliver

• Working in cross-functional, product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation

• Deputising for other members of the platform team and taking on broader responsibilities as needed

�� What we're looking for

You'll have strong professional experience working with event-driven architectures using serverless technologies such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Azure Serverless.

Beyond that, you'll bring:

• Demonstrable experience collaboratively designing and implementing observability, monitoring, and reporting solutions for complex cloud infrastructures in a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including solutions for squad-specific use cases

• Confidence reading and maintaining web application code, with the ability to design and build small apps, preferably in JavaScript or TypeScript

• Experience with cloud computing platforms and a working familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools

• A collaborative approach, comfortable promoting and leading collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and able to frame work in terms of impact.

You'll want to contribute in all areas, not just your own lane. You'll be comfortable working at pace across a range of digital systems, always looking for ways the team can keep getting better. And you'll be excellent at remote working, building relationships and managing your time effectively.

Specific technical skills matter less to us than a sound engineering mindset and the ability to bring others with you.

�� Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working — we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

�� Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors. 

If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.

�� Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps

You'll answer a few admin questions followed by three questions about your day-to-day work. Answers are anonymised, randomised, and reviewed by a panel, so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.

If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.

Interview dates:

Interview 1: Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 July 2026

Final interview: Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 July 2026

If this sounds like somewhere you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.

We're getting strong responses to our roles and we may close applications early. If you're interested, don't leave it too long.

We are an equal opportunities employer.

We're an equal opportunities employer and committed to making sure everyone is treated fairly, regardless of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race.