People Operations Lead

About the role

📍 London - Hybrid. 2 days per week in our London office, 3 days remote / work from home (40 hour week) 🚆 Monthly travel to one of our other offices (Sheffield/Lincoln) is essential. ✴ All travel and accommodation costs to non-base office locations are fully covered. We've spent the last three years transforming how our People Team operates. Now we're looking for someone to own the machine and work out what comes next! About the role We're looking for a People Operations Lead to own the operating layer of our People function, managing our People Operations Specialist and reporting directly to our People Director. This isn't a traditional HR Operations role, and we're not looking for someone to simply keep existing processes running. We want someone who's curious about how and why things work - someone who spots friction, interrogates the data, challenges the way we've always done things and builds something better. You'll own our People operations, systems and data across the end-to-end colleague lifecycle - from onboarding, offboarding and Right to Work through to colleague requests, payroll processes, benefits and compliance. You'll make sure the fundamentals run brilliantly while continuously looking for ways to simplify, automate and improve them. Data is a big part of this role. We need someone who's genuinely at home in the numbers - happy getting into a complex spreadsheet, reconciling different data sources, spotting inconsistencies and using data to understand what's happening rather than simply reporting what it says. You'll also take significant ownership of our reward infrastructure, including quarterly pay reviews, salary benchmarking and banding, benefits and gender pay gap reporting. And increasingly, you'll help us answer a bigger question: what work should technology be doing for us? We're already exploring how AI and automation can remove repetitive work across People Operations. You don't need to arrive as an AI expert, but you do need to be curious, willing to experiment and excited about what technology could make better. If you get a kick out of taking something that already works, understanding it properly and making it simpler, smarter and better, we'd love to hear from you. Who are you? You're probably someone who sees People Operations a little differently. You care about delivering a brilliant colleague experience, but you're just as interested in the systems, data and processes underneath it. Numbers don't scare you - quite the opposite. You don't accept a seven-step process because it's always had seven steps. You want to understand why it's there, whether we still need it and what would happen if we did it differently. In practice: You're naturally curious, analytical and highly numerate, with advanced Excel skills and the confidence to work independently with complex data. You love improving how things work and have redesigned and implemented processes, rather than simply inherited and administered them. You're comfortable getting into the detail while still seeing the bigger picture - whether that's interrogating a spreadsheet, configuring a workflow or digging into an HRIS. You're pragmatic, comfortable with ambiguity and good at bringing people with you when something needs to change. What we need from you Significant People Operations experience, with ownership of end-to-end People processes. Hands-on experience owning or significantly shaping People systems and data, including an HRIS (we use Personio, but we're open to others!) and/or headcount planning systems. Strong numerical reasoning and advanced Excel skills - you're comfortable reconciling data, spotting anomalies and turning numbers into useful insight. Experience across reward and benefits, ideally including pay reviews, salary benchmarking and banding, benefits and gender pay gap reporting. A track record of continuous improvement and using systems, data and technology to make People Operations better. An active inter

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