Director, People Performance & Measurement

The challenge

At Nscale, the mission is the boss. Today, the mission is execution.

Performance at Nscale covers two things. How each person is doing, and how well our teams and business run. Both are part of the operational excellence we're building. In the People team, we break great execution into five things an organization needs, an acronym we use called SAAFU. An organization needs to be:

• Steerable: there's a shared way of setting goals and direction.
• Analyzable: there's real visibility into where we're winning or losing.
• Accountable: single owners for what matters, with regular check-ins.
• Frictionless: free of the friction that wastes energy, but not the friction that's there on purpose!
• Understandable: everyone can see why we're doing what we're doing, and what matters right now.

This role doesn't own all five of these. This is built together with the Chiefs of Staff, our leaders, and the executive team. But it's the voice asking whether we're actually living up to them, and it owns one piece of "Accountable" directly: individual performance systems and feedback. The test: if you ask a manager what they expect from their team, then ask the team, there should be zero daylight between them.
What you'll own

You build the system that makes clear how we assess, reward, and improve performance, in close partnership with our compensation team on how that lands in someone's pay.

• Build and embed the performance and feedback culture: the cadence, the tooling, the systems, and how it actually reaches a manager and a team, not just the paperwork behind it.
• Own the requirements for our performance tech platform, working directly with engineering.
• Drive the goal cascade, functional performance metrics and reporting, and the line that connects a rating to reward.
• Partner with each function to make sure what they're measuring is real and measurable, across Sales, Data Centers, AI Infrastructure and Cloud/Software, where almost nothing runs the same way twice. The targets stay theirs. You're the partner who pressure-tests them.
• Run the center of expertise for how we think about and act on performance, so Exceptional means the same thing wherever it's given, and co-run calibration with the People Partners at year end.

What you'll bring

You've built a company-wide performance or measurement system before, spanning team and individual, at a large or fast-scaling organization, not inherited one. You've taken it in front of senior leadership and held your own there. You've worked across more than one kind of business, not one function repeated enough times to look like range. Sales, Data Centers and Engineering don't run on the same rhythm, and you've proven you can design for genuinely different contexts rather than stretch one template across all of them.

You've partnered closely with compensation before, reward only works if the mechanics you build actually hold up against how comp gets decided, and you know that boundary well. You think like an operator as much as a designer, hands on, not someone who delegates the hard parts to a junior. You don't hand the mechanism off once it's built, you run it.

This job likely isn't for you if:

• You want a single, familiar playbook you can apply everywhere.
• You'd rather advise on measurement than run the mechanics yourself.
• You're looking for a steady, slow-moving build.
• You want senior leadership exposure without having designed what you're presenting.

Your first six to nine months:

• Lock the functional metrics and goal cascade for every vertical, agreed with function leads, ready before a quarter starts.
• Stand up the mechanics that connect a rating to reward, and take it in front of senior leadership once.
• Run your first full quarterly cycle and your first year-end calibration, alongside the People Partners.

When you apply

Add a note to the end of your resume that clearly identifies one system you've built that connects a measure to a real outcome, and one sentence on how you know it worked. That's far more useful to us than a cover letter.

The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.

Salary Range

$160,000-$280,000 USD

Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.