People Operations Lead

About the role

Kairon has grown from 18 to 60 people in two years, across offices in Lisbon, New York and Singapore and a growing remote team. Our people processes have kept up mostly through goodwill and shared docs. We want someone to turn them into systems that will still work at 150.

You’ll be our first dedicated People Operations Lead, reporting to the COO and working closely with every team lead. The role is broad on purpose. Some weeks you’ll be fixing an onboarding checklist; others you’ll be designing how we run performance reviews for the first time.

What you’ll do

• Own onboarding end to end, so every new hire ships something real in their first two weeks.
• Run our hiring process with team leads: role scorecards, interview loops and fast, kind candidate communication.
• Design a simple, fair review and compensation cycle, and run the first one next spring.
• Manage payroll, benefits and contracts across Portugal, the US and Singapore with our employer-of-record partners.
• Keep our handbook, policies and people data accurate, short and easy to find.

What you’ll bring

• 5+ years in people operations or HR at a startup or scale-up between 30 and 300 people.
• Hands-on experience with multi-country employment, ideally including the EU and the US.
• Sound judgment on sensitive conversations, and the discretion that comes with it.
• A habit of writing things down. Most of our decisions start as a short doc.
• Comfort with HR and payroll tools, and the instinct to automate a task you’ve done three times.

Nice to have

• Experience building a first performance review or levelling framework.
• Familiarity with Portuguese employment law.
• Curiosity about how AI agents could take repetitive admin off your plate.

Benefits

Competitive salary and equity, 30 paid days off, full health cover, 20 weeks of parental leave, a $2,000 yearly learning budget and a flexible split between our Lisbon office and home. Read about our values and team.