Head of People Operations

What You’ll Do

People Operations

• Own the full employee lifecycle end-to-end — onboarding/offboarding, benefits, payroll coordination, leave, and immigration/regulatory compliance — including leading the transition of benefits and payroll from our PEO to in-house administration.
• Build the operational rigor — process documentation, SOPs, data integrity — that lets these processes hold up as the company scales past 200+ employees and multiple sites.

People Programs

• Be the execution partner for our core company processes — compensation administration, performance management, and employee development — turning them into clean, well-run programs rather than one-off events.
• Bring a modern, evidence-based approach to how these programs run, iterating based on what’s actually working.

People Systems & AI-Forward Tooling

• Evaluate and select HRIS and People systems appropriate for a scaling company, favoring proven platforms over one-off custom builds.
• Bring a genuinely curious, evaluative mindset to AI-enabled features and vendors — fluent in assessing what’s built into ATS, HRIS, and benefits platforms, without needing to personally build custom automation.

Atomizer Experience

• Own the day-to-day experience of being at an Atomic Machines site — company and site-level events, and the everyday things that make people feel like part of a team — across Emeryville, Santa Clara, and future locations.
• Ensure that experience is consistent across sites as the company grows, rather than depending on informal effort at any one location.

Team Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop the existing People Operations team through this maturation.
• Make deliberate vendor, tooling, and headcount tradeoffs; set clear priorities and quality standards across Operations, Programs, Systems, and the Atomizer Experience.

What You’ll Need

• 10 + years of progressive People Operations leadership experience, ideally including a startup-to-scale transition; experience in a technical, hardware, or manufacturing environment is a plus.
• Direct experience bringing a function like benefits or payroll in-house, or managing complex payroll/benefits administration at scale.
• A strong track record of process design and systems implementation: HRIS selection/implementation, SOP design, and data governance.
• A genuinely curious, pragmatic approach to AI-enabled People Ops tools and being comfortable evaluating and adopting them thoughtfully.
• Experience owning performance management or employee development programs at a scaling company.
• Experience owning in-office employee experience, events and site-level culture — across multiple locations, distinct from building/facilities management.
• Strong California (and ideally multi-state) employment law fluency.
• Executive presence: comfortable advising executives and translating operational plans into business terms.
• Experience managing, coaching, and developing People Operations team members.
• Bachelors Degree.
• Ability to work in-person from Emeryville, with periodic presence in Santa Clara.