Founding People Lead (m/f/d)

Location: London, United Kingdom; must be based in or able to work from London and willing to travel to Zurich and offsites

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 end-to-end recruiting across commercial, technical, and operational roles, partnering with hiring managers on role requirements, interview kits, and candidate communication.
• Build and automate onboarding, offboarding, performance-review, and other people workflows using Notion, Slack, and AI agents.
• Evaluate and implement the people technology stack to reduce repetitive administrative work.
• Design culture rituals, communication systems, offsites, and initiatives for a distributed hub-and-spoke team.
• Run performance management, employee relations, and day-to-day employee support on culture, wellbeing, and people matters.
• Own HR administration, compliance, compensation, and benefits across the CH, DE, and UK entities.

Requirements

• 4–7 years of experience in People Ops, HR, Recruitment, Engineering, or an adjacent field such as operations, consulting, or a founder's office, including startup or high-paced experience.
• Experience building a people function or key people processes from scratch and managing multiple workstreams in parallel.
• Full-cycle recruiting experience across different roles and departments, including sourcing, screening, and closing.
• Strong stakeholder management, business acumen, and experience building trusted relationships with founders and distributed teams.
• Experience setting up HRIS, processes, policies, and compliance is ideal; daily use of AI tools and a strong automation mindset are expected.
• Strong written and verbal English required; German is a nice-to-have.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct impact on a company transforming real estate decarbonization.
• Ownership of the people function's tooling and systems from scratch.
• Close collaboration with leadership and exposure to all company functions.
• Mission-driven, high-performance, distributed culture with Zurich and London as physical hubs.
• Learning and development budget.