Director of HR

Why you should join our team

Imagine stepping into a pivotal role where you'll architect how Smartcat builds, evaluates, and scales high-performing teams in an AI-native, globally-minded organization. This is not a traditional HR leadership role. This is a role focused on increasing Talent Density across the company, ensuring we have the right people in the right roles, with clear expectations, strong performance, and measurable impact.  

As a leader, you will be empowered with significant autonomy and trust to design a People Operations function that is fast, data-driven, and AI-first by design. You will play a critical role in helping Smartcat grow through better decisions, not just more people, by raising the bar on performance, hiring, and accountability across the organization. This is your opportunity to fundamentally reshape how a company drives performance, develops talent, and builds a highly talented team.

Mission

Reporting to the VP of People, your mission is to increase Talent Density at Smartcat by modernizing how we assess, develop, and manage performance across our global team.  Talent density at Smartcat is defined as the overall quality, impact, and readiness of our people, measured through performance, potential, and business outcomes. You will partner closely with leadership to:

• Make performance expectations clear and objective
• Ensure talent decisions are based on data, not perception
• Improve hiring quality, onboarding effectiveness, and retention of top performers
• Actively manage performance across the organization, especially within the middle of the distribution
• You will also serve as the escalation point for HR-related matters and oversee global People Operations across a 240-person company spanning 35+ countries.

To thrive in this global role, you must be located on the East Coast or willing to work East Coast hours. Relocation is not offered.  

Outcomes

• Redesign Talent Reviews to be AI-first, efficient, and objective.  Partner with the VP of People to reimagine the talent review process from the ground up. Build a system that:
  • Is light-weight for all team members
  • Produces richer, more actionable insights with continuous feedback
  • Leverages AI to streamline feedback, calibration, and coaching
  • Anchors performance in clear KPIs and objective signals

• Embed AI into everything PeopleOps. Be at the forefront of identifying and implementing innovative AI solutions to dramatically boost our team's productivity, freeing up valuable time from manual tasks and significantly enhancing the employee experience. Implement at least two AI-driven process improvements that reduce manual workload by at least 20%. 

• Be a strategic business partner.  As a strategic partner to our business leaders, align people strategies with business goals, helping drive performance, talent development, and organizational culture. Using our AI-generated PeopleOps data to make data-informed decisions with deep relationship building, ensuring both the business and our people thrive together. Provide quarterly talent insights that link people metrics to business performance. Work closely with leadership to actively manage the middle of the performance distribution. Equip managers with clear frameworks, data, and expectations to:
  • Coach individuals to higher performance
  • Make timely, confident decisions when performance does not improve
  • Reduce ambiguity and increase accountability across teams

• Oversee our HR Generalist and day-to-day operations.  Serve as the first point of escalation for HR policies, procedures, sponsorship, compensation, benefits, time away, employee relations issues, investigations, global benefits, employee engagement, and global connections. There is a lot that will come your way being in over 30 countries with 5+ entities.   

How you’ll ramp

By Day 30: Laying the Foundation for Impact 

• Understand Talent Density Today: Develop a clear view of current talent density across the organization, including performance distribution, calibration gaps, and areas of inconsistency.
• Become a Power User of Our People Ecosystem: Dive headfirst into our suite of HR tools, including Google Workspace (Sheets, Slides, Docs), HiBob, Gusto, Metaview, ChatGPT, Claude, Notion, Omni, Slack, Pave.com, and Remote.com. You'll quickly gain mastery over these platforms, enabling you to drive efficiency and innovation within our People Operations function.
• Master the Global Landscape of People Operations: Immerse yourself in our diverse global People Operations processes, from seamlessly onboarding and offboarding team members to expertly navigating performance management, talent reviews, and benefits administration. You'll gain expertise across our US, UK, Europe, and CIS-based teams, as well as our valued contractors and independent entrepreneurs.
• Shape the Future, Present Your Strategic Vision: After your first 30 days, you'll synthesize your initial learnings into a compelling 60-90-120 day roadmap, presenting your strategic insights and proposed initiatives directly to the VP of People and the People Operations Leadership team. This is your opportunity to influence our future direction.
• Forge Meaningful Connections: Immediately begin building strong, collaborative relationships with key internal and external stakeholders. You'll become a trusted partner, and an empathetic manager, understanding their needs and contributing to a positive and productive work environment.

Day 60: Driving Key Initiatives Forward

• Design the Future of Talent Reviews: Begin building a new AI-first talent review approach that reduces manager burden while improving depth, accuracy, and consistency of performance insights.
• Start Driving Talent Density Conversations with Leaders: Partner with leadership to evaluate talent across teams, with a focus on identifying risks, gaps, and opportunities to raise the bar.
• Start to own the HR escalation issues: You will have confidence addressing topics such as employee investigations, sponsorship, payroll, benefits, time away, leave of absences, onboarding and off-boarding.
• Address Middle Performance Proactively: Introduce clear frameworks and expectations for managing middle performers, ensuring consistent action across teams.   

Day 90: Shaping Our Global People Strategy

• Embed AI into the Heart of People Operations: Identify and begin implementing high-impact AI solutions that streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and enhance the employee experience. You’ll demonstrate how AI can become a true teammate in how we operate, decide, and deliver.
• Deliver Strategic Insights and a Future Roadmap: Present your 12-month People roadmap to the VP of People and People Operations Leadership team, showcasing how data and AI will drive performance, culture, and engagement across our global team.
• Establish Yourself as a Strategic Partner: By Day 90, you’ll be a trusted advisor to business leaders, using data-informed insights and strong relationships to guide decisions that help both the business and its people thrive.

What you’ve accomplished

• You have a track record of success building a high-performing, scalable, AI-first, data-driven people operations function that increases talent density throughout the entire employee lifecyle including: onboarding, employee relations, performance management, talent development, off-boarding, and training.  
• You have experience improving performance management systems and are comfortable making talent decisions that raise the bar, including addressing steady performance and underperformance.
• You are highly data-driven and know how to translate people ops data into clear insights that influence leadership decisions. Rather than reporting on the data, you know how to tell a story with the data.
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and prioritizing what matters most to drive impact.  You have experience redesigning processes to be more efficient and scalable, with the chops to implement AI-driven workflows.
• You understand how to balance the strategic big picture with the tactical execution and can easily switch between the two at any moment. 
• You’re a people manager that people love working for and working with!  You’re a great coach, mentor and business partner. You understand the art of pushing back to challenge the business and the art of having difficult conversations.