Head of People & Performance

About the role

Sunrise Robotics, a robotics company focused on intelligent, flexible robots for manufacturing, is hiring its first Head of People & Performance. You report to the CEO and sit on the leadership team, owning hiring, performance, pay, promotion and separation, as well as the underlying people platform: contracts, onboarding, HRIS and compliance across more than 10 European countries. The team has grown to 50 people in nine months and is expected to keep growing, so the role is primarily to build lean, scalable systems.

Key responsibilities

• Design one performance cycle for the whole company and run the first one, so leaders can identify underperformers and act quickly.
• Build the employee experience from day one to last.
• Build comp bands for current roles, standardise pay awards and equity top-ups, and hang them on a light leveling structure.
• Own hiring: manage internal recruiting, embedded partners and hiring managers, and standardise scorecards and interview packs.
• Own people operations end-to-end: contracts, onboarding, offboarding, HRIS, employer of record, policies, benefits by country and payroll inputs, automating what can be automated.
• Coach leadership and team leads on performance and give direct feedback.
• Codify the company's culture and keep the organisation compliant across more than 10 countries.

Required profile

• Experience building a people system at a fast-growing company, such as the first people hired at a Series A, or a founder/operator role.
• Systems thinking and comfort with numbers such as comp bands, equity and headcount plans.
• Experience operating across more than 10 countries.
• Detail-oriented, a good writer, and able to hold confidences.
• Direct, pushes back on founders, and understands the work of robotics engineers and deploy engineers.

Required skills

• Bonus: knowledge of Deel, Shapes and Ashby or equivalents.
• Bonus: having automated people-ops work with AI tools yourself.
• Bonus: experience in a hardware or deep-tech company.

The company describes itself as outcome-driven, direct and high-trust, with very little hand-holding.