People and Operations Manager

Reinventing restaurants. Building Europe’s fastest-growing food concept.

Huuva brings the most loved city-center restaurants closer to suburban communities — making high-quality dining more accessible than ever.

Our multi-brand food halls let customers mix and match dishes from top restaurants in a single order, whether dining in or ordering for delivery.

Since launching in 2021, we’ve grown from one kitchen to one of Finland’s largest restaurant platforms, with over 120 employees and soon 17 locations across Finland, and we’re continuing to grow. We’re backed by world-class investors including General Catalyst and Lifeline Ventures, early backers of Wolt, Oura and Supercell.

Our team combines restaurant veterans from Michelin-starred kitchens with people from tech companies such as Unity, VOI, and Zalando.

About the role

As People & Operations Manager, you’ll own our people function and the operational backbone that keeps the company running. You’ll work closely with our managers, who lead their teams day to day, and act as their trusted partner on everything from hiring and onboarding to difficult conversations and compliance.

Alongside the people work, you’ll run our office operations and administer the tools our team relies on every day, including Google Workspace, Slack, TaitoAI and Tamigo. A key part of the role is continuously improving how we work: spotting manual, repetitive tasks and turning them into efficient, AI-driven processes.

This is a hands-on, full-time role based at our Helsinki office, reporting to CEO.

What you’ll do

• Supporting managers and teams: Coach and support managers, who are the first point of contact for their teams, in handling employee concerns, conflicts, disciplinary processes and terminations fairly and in line with law and policy. Step in directly for sensitive cases or when an employee needs a contact outside their line of management.

• Recruitment and onboarding: Coordinate kitchen crew hiring processes end to end, partner with managers on role definitions, manage job ads and candidate pipelines, and make sure new hires have a smooth first few weeks.

• Policies and compliance: Maintain the employee handbook and HR policies, and keep the company compliant with employment law, collective agreements, working-time rules and occupational health and safety requirements.

• Compensation and benefits: Support salary review and payroll coordination with our external payroll provider.

• Performance and development: Run performance review cycles, support managers in giving feedback, and organise training and development programmes.

• HR operations and data: Maintain employee records and HR systems (Taito, Tamigo)

• Culture and engagement: Run engagement surveys, support internal communications, and drive initiatives such as company events & parties that improve retention and wellbeing.

• Office operations: Manage workspaces and work equipment, including the setup and return of tools when employees join and leave.

• Company tools: Administer Google Workspace, Slack, TaitoAI and Tamigo, including user management, access rights and basic configuration.

• Process automation: Identify manual and repetitive tasks across HR and operations, and turn them into efficient, AI-driven processes.

You’ll thrive here if you

• Enjoy being a hands-on generalist across people matters, office operations and tools

• Combine empathy with good judgement, and can be both approachable and firm

• Take ownership and like building processes and automations from scratch

• Feel energised by a fast-moving environment with room to improve things

• Have a can-do attitude and have achieved something meaningful in your work, studies or personal life

• Communicate fluently in English, both spoken and written

• Are based in Helsinki and happy to work mostly from our office

What we offer

• Salary range: 4,300–5,000 €/month, depending on experience

• Option package — real ownership in the company’s future

• A steep learning curve and fast career progression as Huuva scales

• Transparent, high-performance culture built on autonomy and accountability

Why this role matters

Our people are what make our stores work. With teams spread across many locations and shifts, the quality of our people practices directly shapes how our guests are served every day.

As Huuva's People & Operations Manager, you’ll build the foundations that let us grow: hiring the right people, giving our managers the support they need to lead well, and making sure everyone has the tools and setup to do their best work.

About the process

1. Application

2. Screening call

3. Live assignment

4. Soft skills interview