About the rolePercepta is growing quickly, and what served us as 20 no longer serves us at 80 Perceptrons. You won't inherit a playbook here, but rather, you'll author it. As our first, dedicated People hire, you'll own the full employee experience, from before they even spend their first day in the office to how they grow in their careers.
You are someone who inherently has always held imaginative but flexible ideas on what a best in class function could look like. You have strong, but loosely held, opinions about what makes a company feel great to work at, and work well, and have mental models and taste for what "best in class" could actually mean in practice. The idea of building the infrastructure that's light enough to serve us today while creating room for what's to come lights you up. You will create and launch V1 of all of our people programs and operations, and know that we'll need to completely reconfigure it as we rapidly scale to a 400 person company, but that's the kind of challenge you live for. You are someone who can build consensus, and figure out creative ways to address the needs of a company in hypergrowth. You want to help our team live our values, work seamlessly, and build the internal infrastructure that sets Percepta apart.
What you will do- Design for the company we're becoming, AND the one we are: You will define what excellence looks like, not just for today, but for the 1000 person version of Percepta.
- Amplify our values and evolve our culture: You will keep the things that are unique to us as a small company, and also hold us accountable to what changes need to happen as we scale. You'll write the first version of each, informed by real opinions about what makes a company great to work at (and the discipline to leave out what doesn't fit us).
- Build a data-driven, AI-driven people org from the ground up. Stand up the headcount, attrition, hiring funnel, and comp dashboards that don't exist yet, so people decisions get made on evidence instead of gut feel, and leadership always has a real-time read on the org's health.
- Turn strong ICs into good managers. Build our first performance management system and manager training from scratch, the frameworks, feedback rhythms, and coaching that help new managers actually manage, and keep the whole team upskilling as we grow.
- Launch and nurture ERGs, create new manager training, evolve our onboarding program, and add other programmatic influence that will codify who we are and shape who we are becoming.
- Handle the hard, unscripted stuff: You will be the point of contact and person responsible for building a process for all employee relations, disputes, hard compensation discussions and direct feedback.
- Build our compensation philosophy and equity framework from scratch, benchmark against the market, and create and shape bands as we scale.
Who you are- You've built a people function (or a significant chunk of one) from zero before; at a startup, or as an early operator wearing the people hat alongside another role. You can point to specific systems you designed, not just programs you administered.
- You have strong, specific opinions about culture, performance, and compensation, and a story about a contrarian call you made that turned out right.
- You're genuinely fine doing the unglamorous ops work yourself: onboarding, offboarding, benefits, immigration paperwork, etc. Titles don't determine what you're willing to touch.
- You're comfortable with ambiguity and reversal, and are okay building something knowing it'll be torn down and rebuilt in six months, without treating that as a problem.
- You communicate directly and can hold a hard conversation (a comp dispute, a performance issue, a founder pushing back on your call) without softening it into losing clarity.
- You understand the best version of this role is as a true partner to the business, not adjacent to it. You see people strategy as inseparable from company strategy.
- You are deeply embedded in the tech, startup, and AI space and have informed opinions on how to be best in class and remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
