Founding People Lead (m/f/d) [80%]

Location: Based in or able to work from London, United Kingdom; willingness to travel to Zurich and team offsites is required.

Company

hirify.global is an ETH Zurich spin-off developing AI-powered Real Estate Decision Intelligence technology to help investors, owners, and asset managers decarbonize buildings while optimizing financial performance.

What you will do

• Own full-cycle recruiting and hiring across commercial, technical, and operational roles.
• Build structured interview kits and standardize candidate communication with hiring managers.
• Design and automate onboarding, offboarding, performance-review, and people administration workflows using Notion, Slack, and AI agents.
• Own the people technology stack and reduce repetitive manual administration through tools and automations.
• Design culture rituals, communication systems, offsites, and initiatives for a distributed hub-and-spoke team.
• Manage employee relations, compensation and benefits administration, HR records, contracts, and compliance across Switzerland, Germany, and the UK.

Requirements

• 4–7 years of experience in People Ops, HR, recruitment, engineering, operations, consulting, or a related field, including startup or high-paced experience.
• Experience owning a people function or key people processes end-to-end and building structure from scratch.
• Experience with full-cycle recruiting across multiple roles and departments.
• Strong stakeholder management, business acumen, and trusted relationship-building with founders and distributed teams.
• Experience with HRIS, processes, policies, and compliance is ideal.
• Strong written and verbal English; based in or able to work from London and willing to travel to Zurich and offsites.

Nice to have

• German language skills.
• Experience using AI tools daily and automating repeatable workflows.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct impact on a company working to transform real estate decarbonization.
• Ownership of the people function's tooling and systems from scratch.
• Close collaboration with leadership and exposure across company functions.
• Mission-driven, high-performance, distributed work environment.
• Learning and development budget.