People Operations Lead

People Operations Lead

Location: New York, NY

Employment type: Full-time

Work arrangement: In person at Harmoni’s NYC office

Reporting to: Co-founders

Compensation: $120,000–$150,000 base salary, plus equity and benefits.

About Harmoni

Harmoni is a manufacturing technology company building a new kind of operating system for the factory floor.

Our factory orchestration platform connects machines, people, materials, and data in one intelligent operating layer. By bringing together real-time information, workflows, automation, and AI, Harmoni helps manufacturers improve throughput, reliability, and on-time delivery.

We are a growing, highly collaborative team based in New York, NY, and Akron, OH. We are venture-backed and recently raised our Series A to accelerate the growth of our platform and team. We operate with a flat structure, move quickly, and give people meaningful ownership of their work. This is an opportunity to help define how a new category of industrial technology is understood - and how Harmoni shows up in the world.

The Role

Harmoni is hiring its first HR person. You will own the entire people function, and recruiting is your top priority.

This role does not come with an HR team or a playbook. You are the department. Some weeks you will be running six searches at once. Other weeks you will be rewriting the handbook, sorting out payroll in a new state, and helping a manager through a hard performance conversation. You will report directly to the founders.

The job grows with the company. The right person builds the function now and grows into leading it, with a team, as Harmoni scales.

What You’ll Own

Recruiting and Talent Acquisition

• Own full-cycle recruiting across engineering, product, sales, customer success, and operations, from intake meeting to signed offer.
• Partner with hiring managers to define roles, write job descriptions, and build structured interview processes.
• Source candidates directly. The people we need rarely apply on their own, so you will go find them.
• Run our ATS, track pipeline metrics, and keep hiring managers on pace with feedback and decisions.
• Manage offers, references, and background checks, and close the candidates we want.
• Decide when to use agencies or recruiting vendors, and when not to.
• Build Harmoni’s employer brand through LinkedIn, referrals, events, and the candidate experience itself.

Onboarding and Offboarding

• Build an onboarding program that gets new hires productive fast, whether they sit in New York, Akron, or a remote sales territory.
• Own new hire paperwork, I-9s, equipment coordination, and first-week plans.
• Run offboarding that is respectful, compliant, and well documented.

HR Operations, Payroll, and Benefits

• Own our HRIS and payroll, working with our payroll and benefits providers.
• Administer benefits, open enrollment, and leaves of absence.
• Register and stay compliant in every new state we hire in.
• Keep employee records accurate and audit-ready.

Policies and Compliance

• Write and maintain the employee handbook and core policies.
• Track federal, state, and local employment law across a multi-state workforce.
• Own compliance on wage and hour, worker classification, required trainings, and postings.
• Know when an issue needs outside counsel, and manage that relationship.

Employee Relations and Performance

• Be the trusted, confidential point of contact for employees and managers.
• Handle conflicts, investigations, and sensitive issues with judgment and discretion.
• Build a performance review and goal-setting process that is simple enough that people actually use it.
• Coach managers, many of them first-time managers, on feedback, performance plans, and difficult conversations.

Compensation and Org Planning

• Build job levels and compensation bands, and benchmark them against the market.
• Administer equity grants in partnership with finance.
• Support administration of sales commission plans.
• Work with the founders on headcount planning and org structure.

Culture, Engagement, and Development

• Keep the culture strong across two offices and a remote team.
• Run regular engagement check-ins and act on what you hear.
• Build early career paths and learning and development programs.
• Plan team events and offsites.

People Data

• Report on headcount, hiring funnel, time-to-hire, retention, and attrition, and use the numbers to make better decisions..

What Success Looks Like

In Your First 90 Days

• You understand the business: what we build, who we sell to, and how the team works.
• You own our active searches and run the hiring process end to end.
• You have audited our payroll, benefits, compliance, and policies, and have a prioritized list of gaps.
• Every new hire gets a consistent, well-run onboarding.
• Our handbook is current and compliant in every state where we have employees.
• Founders and managers come to you first with people issues.

Over Time

• We hire the right people quickly, and they stay.
• Hiring managers trust your process, and candidates walk away impressed even when they do not get the offer.
• No compliance surprises.
• Performance and pay decisions are fair, consistent, and easy to explain.
• Our people plans stay ahead of growth, not behind it.
• You grow into leading People at Harmoni and build your own team.

What We’re Looking For

• 3-5 years of HR experience, with significant hands-on recruiting, ideally in-house.
• Exposure to generalist work: onboarding, benefits, payroll, employee relations, and compliance. If you are a recruiter who has picked up generalist work and wants all of it, we want to hear from you.
• Experience hiring for both technical and commercial roles.
• Working knowledge of employment law and multi-state compliance, and the honesty to say when you need to check.
• Comfort with HRIS, ATS, and payroll systems.
• Sound judgment and real discretion with confidential matters.
• Strong organization across many concurrent priorities.
• Clear, direct writing, from job posts to policies to sensitive employee emails.
• The ambition to build a function and lead it.

Bonus Points

• Experience at a startup or high-growth company.
• Experience as the first or only HR person, building from scratch.
• Recruiting software or hardware engineers.
• Background in manufacturing, industrial, or hardware companies.
• Hiring and managing remote employees across multiple states.
• Equity administration experience.
• SHRM-CP or PHR certification.

You do not need to match every preferred qualification. If you have run real searches, handled real people issues, and want to own the whole thing, we encourage you to apply.

The Right Person for This Role

You want ownership. You would rather build the system than inherit one, and you are not waiting for someone to hand you a plan.

You treat recruiting as a craft. You learn the business well enough to know what great looks like in each role, you can talk to an engineer and a sales rep in their own language, and you sell Harmoni honestly to the people we need.

You are the person people trust with hard things. You keep confidences, you tell leaders what they need to hear, and you treat every employee fairly, including the ones who are leaving.

You are equally comfortable closing a candidate on Monday and untangling a benefits question on Tuesday. You know the work is unglamorous at times, and you do it well anyway.

Most importantly, you want to help build the team that builds Harmoni, and you want to grow into the leader of that function as we scale.