Senior People Business Partner

Senior People Business Partner

The world of work is changing and so is the profession of HR. No-one knows what the future will look like. This is an opportunity to shape it.

This role will play a key part in shaping the future of work at SUSE - both in the functions you partner with and in the People Business Partner role itself.

This is not a traditional or transactional HR role, absorbed in repetitive admin and processes. We are looking for a Strategic Consultant and Creative Change Catalyst.

Our team is evolving along our ambitious multi-year capability roadmap. You will find us operating from an established foundation as trusted, credible counsels and in a phase of accelerating our impact. We are looking for someone who is excited to help us continue to elevate our impact, maximising technology and human value creation whilst navigating today's reality - we have work to do on our processes, systems and ways of working. 'Good' is being industry-leading and AI-first. We think that's exciting.

In this role, you will partner with senior leaders, use strategic courage, AI fluency, and deep business acumen to navigate external volatility and translate potential into measurable business impact. Our purpose is to ensure SUSE delivers double-digit growth and our people thrive.

We role model learning and skill growth by prioritising it for ourselves. You will be part of a team committed to and passionate about your learning, with significant opportunities for you to build and develop future-focused skills and experiences in AI, future-of-work design, and high-level strategic consulting with the flexibility to pursue learning that matters to you.

We are redesigning the future. Join us to build something we never imagined possible.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver the 3-Year Strategy: Partner with senior business leaders to deliver performance through alignment of their business strategy with the FY27–FY30 People Strategy, with a focus on long-term value creation.

• Drive Business Impact & ROI: Focus on measurable people and business outcomes, evaluating people initiatives through metrics, and return on investment (ROI).

• Navigate Volatility: Act as a trusted partner helping leaders navigate the volatility of external forces with confidence and strategic courage.

• Industry-leading organisation building: Partner with the business to operate as an industry-leading organisation, leading and delivering customer and people focused change and transformation.

• An AI-First Team Builder: Serve as a catalyst for AI adoption and growth of AI fluency within our teams, partner with the business to lead the human and cultural side of AI transformation, balancing rapid AI adoption with ethical stewardship and psychological safety.

• Unlock Capability: Build AI confidence within leadership teams, unlocking digital capabilities across SUSE to turn potential industry threats into distinct business opportunities.

• Task-First Work design: In order to understand what transformation means to our people, we must first understand the work itself. Partner with leaders and teams to challenge existing workflows, evaluate how work happens today and how it can be done tomorrow, identify tasks that should be automated through technology and the high-value work that must remain deeply human. Support the re-design of work in order to maximise efficiency and customer-value whilst enabling our people to engage in meaningful, high-impact, purpose-driven work.

• Preserve and Nurture Culture: As we automate transactional tasks, champion the how. Intentionally invest in human connection, wellbeing, collaboration, and psychological safety as key drivers of corporate value.

• Performance Coaching: Coach and elevate business leaders into high-impact performance coaches.

• High Performance team building and Facilitation: Identify opportunities to create and deliver team and leadership development interventions at meetings, offsites etc

• Skills-Based Architecture: Lead the ongoing transformation toward a skills-based organization, defining what skills are needed to deliver our strategy and company goals.

• Engagement: Identify opportunities and solutions to continuously improve employee experience and engagement

• Collaborating with our broader people team: (including Employee Relations, Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, Learning and Development, HR Ops, Engagement & Wellbeing), evolving how we work together, and what we deliver, whilst supporting each other to feel meaning, purpose and joy in our work.

• Building community, relationships and connections across the business: to continuously improve how we collaborate and deliver results.

Skills & Experience

Skills:

• Stakeholder Influence and partnership: Building influence and trust with senior leaders and team members across the world, when you don't share an office. Navigating time zones, communication methods and matrixed organisations to get things done.

• Strategic Courage: The bravery to challenge the status quo, speak truth, have difficult conversations and notice what will help us go faster and be better.

• Talent Strategy: Defining and mapping the skills needed, available and emerging. Translating business strategy into talent strategy. Leveraging and embedding talent programmes and initiatives for maximum impact to build skills, opportunities and internal mobility in support of our goal to be a world-class talent builder.

• Change Leadership: A proactive, positive, leader of change. Observing opportunities, asking 'what if' and helping others see the 'why'. Making things happen and bringing people along with you in large-scale transformation. Going beyond delivery of a change plan, to landing a change for business impact.

• Work and Organizational Design: Alongside the more traditional organisation design, work design is an emerging skill within the People profession; we would love to learn this skill together.

• Data Analysis and Storytelling: Our core data is good; you will need to be able to translate that data into a simple, compelling message that influences leaders to act. Our reporting and ambition for predictive analytics is a work in progress; you will need to be able to navigate the reality of today whilst we work to build our analytics of the future.

• Strategic Consulting and Coaching: Scale and build leadership capability and performance through coaching, knowing when to be a consultant and when to be a coach, going beyond'responsive order-taking' to understanding business problems and proposing solutions.

• Facilitation: Creating opportunities within the teams you partner, to facilitate learning moments and sessions eg. offsite team meetings, all hands calls etc

• Emotional Intelligence: The 'human' in Human Resources. Role modelling Emotional Intelligence and empathy to build trust and psychological safety. Understanding your own emotions and those of others. The ability to listen actively, accurately understand another's perspective, and adapt to their needs. Supporting leaders and team members develop these skills

• Systems thinking: The ability to see the whole organisation as an interconnected, living system, not just a set of separate departments/processes. Solving root causes, not just symptoms

• Tech-Forward & Curious: An active curiosity regarding the future of work, fluent in AI tools, with understanding of how technology expands what is possible, and a proficient user of enterprise tools like Workday.

Preferable Experience:

• Proven HR Leadership: Progressive HR business partnering experience, preferably within fast-paced, matrixed global technology environments.

Competencies:

• Adaptable Resilience

• Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making

• Execution

• Influencing with Empathy

• Leading and Developing People

• Learnability

• Self-Awareness

• Strategic Thinking with Business Acumen

Human Resources

We empower you to be bold, driving your career to create the future you want. We celebrate and reward your achievements.

SUSE is a dynamic environment that is evolving rapidly, thus requiring agility, strong entrepreneurship and an open mind.

This is a compelling opportunity for the right person to join us as we continue to scale and prosper.

If you're a big thinker, obsessed by execution and thrive in a dynamic environment in which you can tangibly create a