Automata on cord

Automata

Head of People

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Automata?
BioTech · MedTech · HealthTech
Automata is a London based biotech company providing robotic automation solutions to the life sciences industry.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
14 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: People Ops
Experience level: Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Building Teams, Business Analysis, Compensation & benefits, Employee engagement
Other skills considered: HR software, Recruitment strategy, Training & development

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 3 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for a Head of People to lead our People and Workplace function across the UK, US and Germany. Reporting to the CFO, you'll be the senior people expert in the business: a trusted partner to the CFO and wider executive team on organisation design, culture, capability and people cost, and the accountable owner for every people-related service our employees rely on, from payroll and benefits to offices, events and visas.

This is a player-coach role. You'll set the people strategy and lead a team, but you'll also roll up your sleeves to fix a payroll issue, rewrite a policy or run a complex employee relations case yourself. You'll build the processes, tools and data that let us scale without losing what makes Automata a great place to work.

We're a growing scale-up operating across three very different employment markets, each with its own law, payroll rules, benefits norms and expectations. The way we hire, develop, reward and support people over the next few years will shape our ability to deliver for our customers. We need someone who can bring consistency and best practice where it matters, local compliance where it's required, and pragmatism everywhere.


Key Accountabilities

1. Business partnering and team leadership

  • Partner with the CFO and executive team to translate the business strategy into a clear, prioritised people plan covering headcount, capability, organisation design, culture and cost.
  • Act as a trusted advisor and coach to executives and senior leaders on organisational change, team structures, leadership effectiveness and sensitive people decisions.
  • Lead workforce planning with the CFO and Finance team, making sure the hiring plan, people budget and organisational design support the commercial and product roadmap.
  • Guide the business through change such as reorganisations, new market entry, restructures or redundancies, ensuring fair process and compliance in each country.
  • Own employee relations and casework, including grievances, disciplinaries, performance concerns and exits, handling them fairly, consistently and in line with local law.
  • Champion and embed Automata's values, building an inclusive culture where diverse teams of engineers, scientists and commercial staff do their best work.
  • Lead, coach and develop a team of four across People and Workplace, setting clear goals, building capability and creating a high-performing, service-minded function.
  • Own the people function budget and manage external partners (payroll, benefits brokers, legal counsel, recruitment and immigration providers), ensuring value for money and quality of service.
  • Report regularly to the CFO, executive team and, where required, the board on people metrics, risks and progress against the people plan.

2. HR operations

  • Global payroll and benefits: own accurate, on-time payroll in the UK, US and Germany, working with providers and Finance on controls, reconciliations and year-end. Design, benchmark and manage competitive benefits packages in each country, including pension, healthcare and insurance, and run annual renewals.
  • HR administration: run a smooth employee lifecycle from offer to exit, including contracts, onboarding, changes, leave, right-to-work checks and offboarding, with accurate records and a great employee experience.
  • Policy and process: maintain a clear, compliant and up-to-date employee handbook and policy set for each country. Track legislative change and keep the business compliant with employment law in all three jurisdictions.
  • HR tooling and systems: own the HR technology stack (HRIS, ATS, performance and engagement tools), driving adoption, integration and automation so processes are self-service and scalable.
  • Data management and reporting: make sure people data is accurate, secure and GDPR-compliant. Build dashboards and reporting on headcount, attrition, hiring, engagement, diversity and people cost that leaders actually use to make decisions.
  • Reward management: build and run a fair, transparent and market-competitive reward framework, including salary bands, levelling, benchmarking, the annual pay review, bonus schemes and equity (share option) administration, working closely with the CFO.

3. Workplace, engagement and communications

  • Internal communications: lead the internal communications strategy, channel management and key messaging ensuring leadership messaging, people changes, policies and company news are communicated clearly and consistently, supporting leaders with all-hands and change communications.
  • Facilities management: oversee our offices, labs and workshop spaces in the UK, Germany and US, including leases, landlords, suppliers, office services, moves and space planning as we grow.
  • Health and safety: make sure we meet our H&S obligations in every location, with suitable risk assessments, policies, training, first aid and fire arrangements, and incident reporting. This includes the specific risks of working with robotics, hardware and lab environments.
  • Event management: plan and deliver company events, offsites and team socials that bring people together across sites and time zones.
  • Insurance management: manage the company's insurance programme with brokers and Finance, including employers' liability, property and employee insurance products, making sure cover is right for each country.

4. Talent and development

  • Recruitment: own the end-to-end hiring process, through internal recruiters, agencies or both. Build a strong employer brand, a structured and fair interview process, and a great candidate experience that attracts top engineering, scientific and commercial talent.
  • Performance management: design and run a simple, effective performance and goal-setting framework that drives regular feedback, fair calibration and clear links to development and reward.
  • Learning and development: build manager and leadership capability, along with career frameworks and progression paths so people can see how to grow at Automata.
  • Employee engagement: measure engagement regularly, share results openly and work with leaders to act on them. Improve retention and make sure people feel heard and valued.
  • Immigration and visa support: manage our sponsorship obligations and visa processes, including the UK Sponsor Licence, US work visas and German permits such as the EU Blue Card, working with specialist advisers so international hires and transfers are smooth and compliant.

What you'll bring

Essential experience

  • Senior HR or People leadership experience in a technology or science business, ideally deep tech, robotics, life sciences or hardware.
  • A track record of leading the people function in a start-up or scale-up through rapid growth and change.
  • Experience running HR across more than one country, ideally including the UK, US and Germany.
  • Experience leading and developing a small team while staying hands-on.
  • Strong knowledge of current HR best practice across the full employee lifecycle, and the judgement to adapt it to a fast-moving business.

Desirable experience

  • Managing visa sponsorship and immigration across multiple countries.
  • Building great Management Information which is used across the business to underpin decision making
  • Managing facilities and H&S
  • Reward/Compensation strategy and management.
  • CIPD Level 7, SHRM-SCP or an equivalent professional qualification.

Knowledge and skills

  • Financial literacy: confident building and managing people budgets, modelling headcount and reward costs, and working closely with the

Company Benefits

Learning & Development budget £1000 per year
Annual Leave 30 days + 8 bank/public holidays
Additional leave 4 volunteer days per year, 1 me-day per quarter and your birthday off!
Private Healthcare Vitality Health, including eye and dental care
Spill All-in-one mental health tool with access to CBT and sessions with therapists
Enhanced parental leave a generous and supportive approach to parental leave
Leadership Coaching access to a Leadership coach for all of our senior managers
Keeping you fed team lunch once a month plus a well-stocked pantry
Dog-friendly offices in the UK
Head of People at Automata
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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