People Operations Lead

Role Overview

• Build and run core People Operations processes across the employee lifecycle
• Own workflows for contracts, onboarding, offboarding, employee records, HRIS/data hygiene, policies, and documentation
• Manage probation tracking and make sure managers hold timely review conversations
• Maintain and improve the employee handbook and core people documentation
• Work closely with Finance on payroll, employment cost tracking, and related approvals, coordinating with external advisors where needed
• Identify people risks early and escalate clearly to the COO and leadership team
• Support hiring managers with role setup, interview process, candidate communication, offer workflows, and hiring process discipline
• Work closely with technical recruiters on niche talent sourcing, candidate pipeline quality, hiring priorities, interview process, and offer coordination
• Support remote and international hiring, including employment, payroll, contract, relocation, and onboarding approaches for hires in other European countries
• Coordinate 30% ruling applications for eligible employees in the Netherlands with external advisors
• Ensure our people processes are grounded in Dutch employment practices while scalable enough for a distributed European team
• Improve our trackers, templates, checklists, dashboards, and operating rhythms for people processes
• Turn ambiguous people operations problems into practical workflows with clear owners, timelines, and next steps
• Drive follow-through across managers, hiring teams, external advisors, and internal stakeholders
• Use tools such as Notion, Ashby, HRIS platform, Slack, ChatGPT, and AI agents to reduce manual work and improve visibility
• Gradually help build lightweight processes for performance reviews, salary reviews, role clarity, and future People function scaling

Requirements

• 5–10 years of HR generalist, People Operations, or HR operations experience in the Netherlands
• Experience in an international startup, scale-up, or fast-changing environment
• Experience supporting remote or distributed teams, with a strong ability to figure out employment practices in other European countries
• Strong knowledge of international hiring practices and the employee lifecycle: onboarding, contracts, HR administration, employee relations, performance support, and offboarding
• Excellent documentation, process-building, and follow-up discipline
• Strong project management instincts: you know how to create owners, timelines, trackers, and next steps
• A builder mindset: you like creating useful systems, not just maintaining existing ones
• The confidence to push back constructively and hold people to agreed processes
• Interest in growing with the company and eventually helping build a broader People team

Benefits

• 25 vacation days per year
• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop
• Flexible working hours and option to work from home 2 days per week
• A hands-on environment where your work will directly improve how the company operates
• A chance to build the People function from the ground up and grow with the company
• The opportunity to shape the future People team, not just operate existing processes
• A fast-moving, mission-driven technical startup environment
• A culture that values ownership, autonomy, direct communication, and practical problem-solving