# Head of People Operations

**Company:** [Atomicmachines](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/atomicmachines)
**Location:** Emeryville, CA, Santa Clara, CA
**Role:** People Ops
**Salary:** $215k – $240k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** HRIS, Payroll, Benefits Administration, Performance Management, employee development, employment law, sop design, Data Governance, ai tools evaluation
**Posted:** 2026-07-28

> Lead end-to-end People Operations, Programs, Systems, and employee experience at a scaling hardware startup. Transition payroll/benefits in-house, implement HRIS with AI-forward lens, own performance management and multi-site culture while coaching the team and advising executives.

## Job Description

## 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.

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