HR Generalist

About the Role

As our HR Generalist, you'll own the machinery behind every person's experience at January. January is adding headcount fast, and every hire widens the surface this role covers: onboarding, benefits, payroll, leave, and the compliance calendar underneath all of it. Your mission is to build the foundation needed to support exceptional talent and ensure that every team member at January has a seamless experience that allows them to focus on their work and thrive.

We are currently hiring for this position in our New York office. As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported.

Responsibilities

• Designing and executing the key moments in the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to exit — running new hire onboarding start to finish with Recruiting and hiring managers, operating the performance and comp cycles, executing offboarding and advising managers through involuntary terminations, and being the first point of contact on pay, benefits, and policy questions.
• Owning HR's operational core — the compliance calendar, benefits administration and Open Enrollment, immigration and visa casework, and leave and accommodations administration.
• Building the HR infrastructure that scales with the company — owning the HR tech stack and vendor relationships, running payroll every two weeks, building the automation and self-serve systems that cut manual steps before they become a bottleneck, and turning HRIS and payroll data into the foundation for real people analytics.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in HR/People Operations
• Nice-to-have: experience with Rippling, Sequoia

Skills

• Read a messy, high‑stakes situation and reach the right call without a clean rule to point to — and update your read when new facts come in instead of defending your first conclusion
• Shift registers fluidly: the warm first contact on someone's first day, the steady presence in a hard conversation, the plain‑English translator between an anxious employee and a lawyer's fine print — sometimes in the same afternoon
• Know the difference between a call that's yours to make and one that needs to go up or across — and you escalate deliberately, through the right channel, not reflexively
• Get the technical details exactly right on work with real legal exposure — a visa classification, a leave calculation, a filing deadline — because you know a small error here doesn't stay small
• Pick up work nobody owns and carry it to a real outcome, not a status update, and you leave behind a process your successor can run without you
• Build collaborative working relationships with Legal, IT, Finance, and outside counsel, and know exactly where HR's call ends and someone else's begins
• Surface a gap before anyone asks — a missed filing, a stalled case, a ticket sitting with the wrong owner
• Hear what someone actually needs underneath what they're asking for, and you fix the system, not just the one instance in front of you