People Operations Lead

The Role

You will own the entire people function at Circadia, excluding recruiting — a solo operator running comp & benefits, the employee lifecycle, culture, compliance, and people systems for a workforce that spans office, clinical, and field staff across the US, UK, and Pakistan.

You'll start as a solo operator, and as Circadia scales you'll build out the People Operations function — designing the roadmap, making the case for headcount, and hiring and leading the team. You are the owner of how it feels to work here: the person employees naturally come to, and the person leadership relies on to keep a multi-state, multi-country company compliant and humane at the same time.

What You'll Own

• Compensation & benefits: Comp band administration and offer calibration with Finance, benefits design and vendor management, payroll/benefits administration oversight through our PEO/HRIS stack, and equity administration coordination with Finance and Legal.
• Employee lifecycle: Onboarding, offboarding and terminations, performance management (review cycles, promotions, PIPs), and retention analysis.
• Culture & employee experience: Build genuine relationships across a distributed, multi-country workforce and keep a real pulse on what people are happy about, what they're not, and what we can do better — then act on it. Own culture programming and values reinforcement, the employee experience end to end, and the ombudsman channel (intake, triage, and escalation).
• Employee relations: Guide people and managers through the moments that matter — leaves, life events, hard conversations, exits — with discretion and judgment that protect both our people and the company. Run investigations with documentation discipline, partnering with counsel on serious matters.
• Compliance & policy: Own the handbook and people policies, multi-state wage/hour and classification compliance, leave management, and occupational health requirements for field and clinical staff. Coordinate immigration if sponsorship arises and oversee automated compliance training. 
• International & distributed: UK employment (contracts, statutory benefits, local compliance or EOR), Pakistan employment/EOR management, and multi-state compliance as the field workforce grows.
• Manager enablement: Partner with our first-time managers on feedback, development, and retention — not just process training — so employees feel they're progressing and fairly assessed.
• Systems & data: Own the HRIS and people-tech stack — evaluate, implement, and replace systems as we scale — plus people data and reporting for leadership (headcount, attrition, org metrics), and continuous streamlining of HR workflows with modern tooling and AI.

Who You Are

• High EQ and warmth. People naturally feel comfortable coming to you; you build trust quickly and at every level — office, clinical, and field.
• Operational rigor. You can take a program — onboarding, an immigration case, a leave process, an investigation — and run it cleanly from beginning to end without dropping details. You like building from scratch.
• Discretion by default. You handle confidential information thoughtfully and know what to share, with whom, and when.
• Comfortable enforcing policy. You can operate, communicate, and uphold policies consistently and fairly — not just write them.
• Independent operator, future builder. You exercise sound judgment without a team around you today — and you know how to design, hire, and lead the function as it grows.

What We're Looking For

• 6–10 years of HR/People Operations experience with end-to-end ownership at a startup
• California employment compliance fluency, including leave management and termination practice
• Employee relations and investigations experience
• Benefits and payroll administration oversight experience
• Performance cycle ownership
• Compensation and leveling knowledge
• Ability to quickly learn, implement, and administer new HR systems — plus comfort using AI and modern tooling to streamline workflows

Especially Valuable

• Working knowledge of UK and Pakistan employment practices
• Healthcare or healthtech industry experience
• HRIS or compliance-automation implementation experience (any platform)
• Familiarity with immigration processes (H-1B, green cards, TN visas)
• Learning & development instincts