Lead, People Partner

Strategic Partnership and Advisory

• Partner with functional and team leaders to translate business priorities into clear people strategies.
• Coach leaders on org design, team effectiveness, leadership capability, and change management.
• Serve as a thought partner on complex people decisions, balancing business needs, employee experience, and risk.

Org Effectiveness and Talent Strategy

• Partner with leaders on workforce planning, org design, and early succession and bench planning across very different functions.
• Diagnose organizational health and performance gaps, and design targeted interventions to improve team effectiveness.
• Drive disciplined performance management, with clarity of expectations, accountability, and development, kept lightweight and scalable as we grow.

Employee Relations and Risk Management

• Lead complex employee relations matters with strong judgment, discretion, and a solutions-oriented mindset, across both exempt and non-exempt populations.
• Partner with the CHRO, employment counsel, and Finance on risk mitigation, compliance, accommodations, leaves, and terminations.
• Apply policy consistently while keeping the employee experience fair and balanced. Document well and escalate cleanly.

Data, Metrics, and Operating Rhythms

• Build the foundational talent metrics that do not exist yet, such as turnover, engagement, time-to-hire, and performance signal, along with the operating rhythm to review them with leaders.
• Translate what the data shows into clear, actionable recommendations, and track progress against priorities.

Change Leadership and Execution

• Lead adoption of key People initiatives (performance, feedback, engagement, manager enablement) with clear communication and sustained follow-through.
• Guide leaders and teams through re-orgs, new operating rhythms, and the employee communications that go with them.

Culture and Employee Experience

• Champion a high-trust, high-performance, feedback-rich culture across teams as different as the lab and the factory floor.
• Improve the employee experience across the lifecycle, and foster inclusive leadership that supports belonging and engagement.
• Be a pragmatic culture carrier who protects trust while helping the company make hard calls well.

Success Criteria

• Leaders across all populations treat you as a true thought partner rather than just support, and lean on you in their hardest moments.
• A basic set of talent metrics and a regular operating rhythm exist where there were none.
• Managers get fast, fair, well-documented guidance on sensitive matters, applied consistently across exempt and non-exempt teams.
• A lightweight performance and feedback cycle runs on schedule, and managers actually use it.
• Core lifecycle processes and hiring intake run reliably, tied to budget and leveling, with no dropped balls.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive HR experience, including significant time as an HRBP or People Partner supporting senior leaders.
• Experience in high-growth, operationally complex environments. Startup, scale-up, biotech, AI, hardware, or manufacturing experience is especially relevant.
• Strong judgment in sensitive employee relations and risk matters across exempt and non-exempt populations. You listen, document, assess risk, hold confidentiality, and escalate appropriately.
• Real strength in org design, talent strategy, and change management.
• Genuinely hands-on. As our Lead People Partner, you do more than advise. You can build the tracker, clean up the process, write the comms, run the meeting, follow up with the manager, and make sure the decision is documented.
• Fluency in leveling, calibration, and performance cycles, and the connection between job scope, pay, and org design.

Skills and Capabilities

• Strong business acumen, with the ability to connect people strategy to operational outcomes.
• Exceptional judgment, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and complexity.
• Data-driven mindset and comfort using metrics to influence decisions.
• Credible, trusted advisor to senior leaders who can challenge constructively.
• Strong facilitation, communication, and executive presence.
• High ownership, and thrives operating independently in a fast-paced, build-it-from-scratch environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting both exempt and non-exempt populations, a real plus given our manufacturing teams.
• A track record of building People programs from messy, early-stage foundations into repeatable, scalable processes.
• Prior partnership with Finance on headcount, compensation, or workforce planning.
• Multi-state employee relations and compliance exposure.