Chief People Officer
About the role
This is not a traditional HR leadership role. As Chief People Officer, your mission is to be the guardian of talent density at Sunday. You will join the leadership team at a pivotal Series B → Series C inflection point, reporting directly to the Co-founder, with full ownership and a real voice at the table from Day 1.
Key Responsibilities
Own talent density. Define and enforce the standard of excellence for every hire, promotion, and exit.
Recruit people who raise the bar in every team they join.
Promote exceptional performers fast. Act decisively, and with empathy, when someone consistently falls below the required standard.
Build performance systems that drive excellence, not bureaucracy.
Design compensation philosophies, promotion frameworks, probation processes, calibration mechanisms, and continuous performance reviews that genuinely hold people accountable and reward those who deserve it.
Hold the leadership team accountable. Challenge leaders, push them to make difficult decisions, and stay in the trenches until those decisions are executed.
Make Sunday magnetic. Build Sunday's Talent Acquisition muscle to close 150+ roles per year. Own employer branding, especially in the US, where Sunday is still early-stage, and make us irresistible to top-tier candidates in a competitive market.
Prepare the People function for scale. Design compliant, adaptable processes across US multi-state employment law (NY, GA, and beyond) and European markets. Partner with Finance on rigorous headcount planning ahead of Series C. Own and evolve the HRIS stack (currently HiBob).
Develop Sunday's next generation of leaders. Build the company's first structured L&D framework. Coach and upskill managers. Ensure every high-potential employee has a clear path and the support to take it.
Bring a rigorous AI lens to People. Apply a coherent, evidence-based point of view on how AI will transform recruiting, performance management, learning, and organizational design, and actively implement it within the People function.
Champion culture across two continents. Shape and protect what makes Sunday special as we grow from 200 to 500+ employees, across US and European teams, time zones, and cultural contexts.
About You
You have operated at C-level or immediately below in a high-growth technology company. You know what it takes to build a world-class People function, because you've already done it.
You are a builder, not just an operator. You have designed performance systems, compensation philosophies, and TA strategies from scratch, not inherited them. You have real 0→1 experience in a scaleup environment.
You are US-based with international leadership experience across at least two countries. You can navigate US multi-state employment law and European work cultures without ever compromising on performance standards.
You have lived through hypergrowth. Headcount doubling, complexity exploding, execution at full speed. You know how to replace intuition with mechanisms and make decisions based on data, not gut feel.
You are a bar raiser. You instinctively raise expectations wherever you go. You refuse to protect harmony at the expense of performance. You believe culture follows talent density, not the other way around.
You have a rigorous, evidence-based POV on AI, not just as a user of tools, but as a strategic thinker about how AI will reshape the People function over the next five years.
Nice-to-haves
Experience in hospitality tech, fintech, or SaaS scaleups (500–1,000 employees).
Experience managing People functions across both US and European markets simultaneously.
A network in high-performance environments for HR.