--- title: Supplier Compliance & Sustainability Lead canonical: https://csrjobs.club/jobs/mountain-warehouse-supplier-compliance-sustainability-lead-41x3 locale: en description: Mountain Warehouse is hiring a Supplier Compliance & Sustainability Lead on CSR Jobs. Discover this in-house sustainability role and apply today. updated: 2026-10-12 company: Mountain Warehouse country: United Kingdom contract: Full time seniority: Senior missions: Responsible communication, Stakeholders engagement, ESG reporting, Product Environmental Footprint job_type: ESG/Sustainability Reporting Manager, Sustainable Procurement Manager posted: 2026-10-12 valid_through: 2026-12-12 apply: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4477593274 source: CSR Jobs --- # Supplier Compliance & Sustainability Lead This role owns Mountain Warehouse's responsible-sourcing agenda across a global supplier base, covering ethics audits, human rights and modern slavery, environmental and packaging compliance, and the traceability data that sits behind them. Day to day that means turning shifting regulation and audit findings into proportionate, verified corrective actions, and keeping supplier evidence clean enough to trust. What makes it consequential is the scale: a fast-growing multi-brand group sourcing outdoor gear across many markets, where packaging waste, product claims and labour standards are real operational risks, not footnotes. Getting this right directly protects workers in the supply chain and cuts the environmental footprint of products sold to millions of customers. This suits someone who is comfortable holding both a spreadsheet and a difficult supplier conversation, and who can move between compliance rigour and pragmatic commercial reality without losing either. ## Job FAQs ### What are the main missions and responsibilities of this role? The core mission is to make Mountain Warehouse's global supply chain demonstrably more responsible and compliant. That means leading assigned workstreams across ethics, sustainability and compliance, translating evolving legal requirements and business commitments into clear plans, controls and measurable outcomes. In practice, the role owns practical policies and guidance for suppliers and internal teams, and supports their onboarding, training and adoption. A large share of the work is risk-based due diligence and assurance: managing audits, assessing findings, and ensuring corrective actions are proportionate, time-bound and verified through to closure. Running parallel is a data agenda, improving the completeness, accuracy and auditability of supplier, product, packaging and environmental data, including traceability records, certifications and supporting evidence. The role also supports compliance with human rights, modern slavery, environmental, packaging, waste and labelling requirements across international markets. Beyond compliance, there is a collaborative improvement remit: partnering with suppliers to reduce packaging, improve material choices and identify carbon and resource-efficiency opportunities. Reporting is a key output, clear dashboards and recommendations that surface progress, emerging risks and priorities. Keeping abreast of legislation and industry standards, and building relationships with auditors, assurance providers and industry bodies, rounds out the mandate. ### Key learning opportunities for this job Because the role spans both supplier compliance and environment/packaging, it offers unusually broad exposure for a single position. A candidate strong in one area can expect to build genuine depth in the other, gaining fluency in packaging producer responsibility, waste reporting, carbon accounting and emissions-reduction approaches, or conversely in social audit standards and responsible-sourcing platforms. The international dimension is a significant learning lever. Working across markets means encountering different regulatory regimes, certification schemes and cultural contexts, which builds a rare comparative understanding of how responsible sourcing is governed globally. Exposure to third-party assurance providers and industry bodies could also deepen credibility in the field. Finally, the emphasis on data governance and reporting tools means the role is likely to sharpen analytical and systems skills (advanced Excel, dashboards and reporting platforms) that are transferable to almost any sustainability function. ### How does the ideal candidate look like (experience, skills)? The ideal candidate brings relevant experience in ethical sourcing, supplier compliance, sustainability, environment, packaging or a related field, ideally within retail, consumer goods or an international supply chain. More than a specific specialism, the posting values the ability to interpret regulations and technical information and turn them into clear, workable processes. Experience managing compliance, assurance, audit, reporting or improvement programmes with multiple stakeholders is central. On the technical side, strong analytical and data-management skills matter, with excellent attention to detail and confidence handling complex datasets; advanced Excel is explicitly requested, along with comfort learning new systems. On the human side, the role needs clear communication and influencing skills across functions, seniority levels and cultures, plus a collaborative, curious and solutions-focused mindset with the confidence to challenge constructively. Advantageous extras include knowledge of responsible-sourcing platforms and social audit standards, packaging compliance and producer responsibility, carbon accounting, traceability and certification schemes, and direct experience with international suppliers and assurance providers. A practical, organised approach that balances planned priorities with reactive demands is probably the quiet differentiator. ### Advice to stand out and make a successful application The strongest applications will mirror the role's dual nature rather than claiming to be everything. Since the posting explicitly accepts depth in either supplier compliance or environment and packaging, the smart move is to lead with your strongest area and show credible working knowledge of the other, a brief, concrete example of crossing over beats a vague claim of broad expertise. Quantify outcomes where possible: audits closed, suppliers onboarded, packaging reduced, data quality improved. Because the role is heavily data-driven, expect Excel and analytical rigour to be tested. Being ready to discuss how you would structure supplier or packaging data for auditability, and how you would handle a messy dataset, would differentiate you. Similarly, prepare a short account of a time you turned a complex regulation into a workable process, since that is the core of the job. On culture, Mountain Warehouse presents itself as fast-paced, change-friendly and built around accessibility to the outdoors. Interviews are likely to probe how you influence suppliers and internal teams without formal authority, and how you balance pragmatism with compliance. Aligning your examples with that tone (hands-on, solutions-focused, comfortable with ambiguity) is likely to land better than a purely technical pitch. ### What aspects of the company's sustainability is this role likely to focus on? The sustainability focus here is heavily supply-chain and product-oriented rather than corporate-level. The role appears to sit at the intersection of **responsible sourcing, human rights and modern slavery compliance**, plus environmental performance across packaging, waste and labelling. For an outdoor retailer whose brand promise is built on people enjoying nature, these are the operational levers that actually reduce harm. Packaging is likely a major thread: reducing packaging, improving material choices and meeting producer-responsibility and waste-reporting obligations across international markets. Alongside that sits traceability, mapping where materials come from, verifying certifications and controlling product claims so that green statements hold up to scrutiny. Carbon and resource efficiency appear as a secondary but growing dimension, tied to supplier-level improvement rather than offsetting. Governance matters too. The emphasis on auditability, dashboards and verified corrective actions suggests this role feeds the data that underpins Mountain Warehouse's external commitments and its risk reporting to leadership. ### What are the main challenges someone in this role might face? One obvious challenge is breadth. The posting explicitly welcomes candidates strong in either supplier compliance or environment and packaging, which signals the role spans a wide agenda and the successful candidate will be stretched beyond their comfort zone. Balancing planned programme work against a steady flow of queries, exceptions and emerging risks is a recurring tension. Another is data quality. The role is tasked with improving completeness and auditability of supplier and packaging data, which usually means inheriting messy, fragmented systems and persuading busy colleagues to fix them. That requires patience and systems-thinking as much as technical skill. External pressure is a third factor. Legislation on packaging, waste, labelling and human rights is shifting across multiple international markets, and the company is expanding through a multi-brand group. Keeping policies proportionate and current while maintaining supplier goodwill, and challenging constructively without becoming purely a blocker, is likely the hardest balancing act. ### How could a typical day look like for someone in this position? A typical day likely revolves around the compliance programme rather than any single crisis. Mornings could involve reviewing audit findings or due-diligence results, chasing corrective actions with suppliers, and updating the dashboards that Buying and Technical rely on. There would be recurring touchpoints with colleagues in Buying, Technical, Freight and Customs, and quieter blocks spent cleaning and reconciling supplier or packaging data. Interspersed with this planned work, the role probably absorbs a steady stream of exceptions: a certification expiring, a packaging claim that needs checking, a supplier query about a standard. The post sits in the Supply Chain department with hybrid working (three days in the London office, two at home) so the office days may cluster the meetings and supplier conversations, while home days suit deeper analytical work. Variability likely spikes around regulatory deadlines, audit cycles or new-market launches, when the pace shifts from steady programme management to coordinating several internal teams at once. ### What are the opportunities for professional growth and development in this role? The role sits within a growing multi-brand group that includes Eastern Mountain Sports and Animal, which suggests scope for the remit to expand as the group's supply base and reporting obligations grow. A Supplier Compliance & Sustainability Lead who delivers measurable improvement could plausibly move toward a broader supply-chain ESG or responsible-sourcing leadership position as the function matures. Because the role touches so many functions (Buying, Technical, Finance, Operations, Marketing) it builds a cross-functional network that is valuable for lateral moves into procurement, quality, product compliance or broader sustainability management. High-visibility projects, such as tightening product-claim controls or rolling out a packaging-reduction programme, offer chances to demonstrate impact to senior leadership. The posting also mentions opportunities to get involved in projects beyond day-to-day work, which suggests the company is open to employees shaping their own development. For someone early in a sustainability career, this breadth is arguably more valuable than a narrow specialism. ### The main stakeholders you might be interacting with The most frequent internal partners are likely Buying, Technical and Supply Chain colleagues, since supplier onboarding, product claims and packaging decisions all depend on them. Freight, Customs, Finance, Technology, Operations and Marketing also feature, each pulling on a different part of the compliance picture, from import documentation to customer-facing claims. The role reports into the Supply Chain department, so expect close alignment with supply-chain leadership on priorities and risk escalation. Externally, the stakeholder map is rich: international suppliers and their factories, third-party auditors and assurance providers, compliance schemes, industry bodies and specialist partners. These relationships are probably where the role spends much of its influencing energy, since corrective actions only close if suppliers engage. A subtler stakeholder group is leadership itself. The dashboards and recommendations the role produces are effectively the lens through which senior management sees supply-chain risk, so the ability to communicate clearly to non-specialists is likely as important as the technical work. --- Source: https://csrjobs.club/jobs/mountain-warehouse-supplier-compliance-sustainability-lead-41x3