About the RoleAs our first dedicated People Operations lead, you'll own the full scope of how Radical Numerics supports its team: compensation, benefits, immigration, onboarding, compliance, and the systems that keep a fast-growing research lab running smoothly. This is a high-impact role for someone who enjoys building from the ground up and wants their work to directly shape how a company grows.
You'll work closely with our CEO, Recruiter, and Operations Manager to shape the employee experience from start to finish. Once a candidate accepts an offer, you'll take the lead and stay with them throughout their time here, from securing visas to making day one seamless, to running performance reviews and handling exits with care. Your goal is to make sure every person on our team feels supported, informed, and set up to do their best work.
Our team spans Tokyo and San Francisco. You'll bring clarity and structure the onboarding process, coordinating across countries, regulations, and time zones so that our people can focus on their research.
Much of our people infrastructure is still being built, and that's where you come in. You'll design the policies and processes we need, run them for the first time, and refine them into repeatable systems that scale as we grow. If you're energized by ambiguity and want to build something lasting, we'd love to hear from you.
What You'll Do- Own compensation and leveling. Maintain comp ranges and the employee-levels mapping, and run equity scenario modeling and benchmarking for new roles.
- Plan and run performance review cycles in Complete.
- Own onboarding and offboarding end to end, including welcome and pre-start communications, background checks, I-9 verification, system access, and departing-employee accounts.
- Serve as primary contact with immigration counsel for O-1 petitions, OPT/EAD cases, and green card renewals, and act as company signatory where appropriate.
- Administer Justworks, including benefits, open enrollment, and state registrations for remote employees.
- Answer employee and candidate questions about benefits and policy.
- Set up and manage international employment through EOR arrangements as needed.
- Partner with outside employment counsel on employee relations, performance concerns, terminations, and changes to offer letters and CIIAs.
- Lead planning on office move scenarios and timelines with our real estate partners alongside our Operations Manager.
- Build the policies, handbook, and compliance practices a growing company needs before it needs them.
What We're Looking For- You have run People Operations at an early-stage company and can explain the systems you built, not just the ones you inherited.
- You have hands-on experience with U.S. employment immigration, especially O-1, OPT and H1Bs and know how to keep timelines and counsel moving.
- You understand startup compensation, including bands, leveling, and equity, and can model tradeoffs clearly for leadership.
- You know PEO and EOR platforms such as Justworks, and understand multi-state and international employment compliance.
- You exercise judgment on sensitive issues and know when to bring in counsel.
- You are organized enough to run many open threads at once without dropping any, and you document them so someone else could pick them up.
- You are comfortable creating a process before there is a playbook.
- You are excited about building a generational company at the intersection of AI and biology.
