People Operations Manager

People Operations Manager | Non-Profit AI Research Lab | San Francisco | $150,000 - $200,000 Base

Be the first person at Transluce whose whole job is people.

Transluce is a non-profit research lab building world-class tools to oversee AI and steer its development for the public good. We use AI to investigate AI at a scale manual testing cannot reach, and we build in public so anyone can use what we make. We're growing from 20 to 40+ employees over the next 12 months - and half the people who'll work here a year from now haven't been hired yet.

The opportunity

Hiring well, keeping the people we hire, and building a place worth staying are among the highest-leverage things we do - and right now, nobody owns that full-time. You'll be the first dedicated People/HR hire, reporting directly to the Chief of Staff. This is an individual-contributor role: you design the systems and run them. We have a solid operational foundation (HRIS, benefits, ATS), but a lot of what works for 20 people won't work for 40+, and your judgment shapes what gets built and in what order.

Strategy and execution aren't separable here. The systems you design are the ones you run day to day - from fixing a payroll error to deciding what we need to build next quarter. As we're a very small team, you may also flex into other operational domains, further expanding your skillset. We expect to keep expanding the operations team, and you'd help define and hire for those future roles.

What you'll do

• Hiring - you enable Transluce's growth by ensuring we can hire the best people
• Own our hiring process end-to-end: candidate communications, scheduling, program management, funnel analysis
• Shape our sourcing strategy - channels, events, partners, outreach - to raise the quality of our top of funnel
• Lead the search for scarce, competitive technical and research talent yourself, not just coordinate high-volume or campus pipelines - this is closer to headhunting than high-volume recruiting coordination
• People - you design the employee experience from recruitment to last day
• Build onboarding that gives new employees everything they need in their first week, not their first month
• Personally run benefits, payroll and HRIS - not just direct someone else running them: process payroll yourself, choose and switch vendors, and be the person the team trusts with any question about them
• Establish the policies and practices that keep our culture strong as we grow - candid feedback, continuous learning, clear expectations for good work
• Advise managers and employees through sensitive situations: performance concerns, conflict, feedback, employee relations
• Compliance - you own our federal and multi-state employment compliance
• Decide what we handle in-house versus escalate to outside counsel and HR providers
• Make the calls that carry real risk: leaves, accommodations, worker classification
• Meet the deadlines that can't slip: visa cases with external counsel, business licenses, state registrations, required trainings and postings
• Location
• We work from our San Francisco office four days a week. Our in-person culture is a big part of what makes Transluce special - this isn't a remote role. We're open to sponsoring international visas for exceptional candidates.

Requirements

• Essential
• You have owned hiring rounds end-to-end alongside hiring managers, with strong foundational HR knowledge
• You have personally owned core people operations - payroll, benefits, onboarding, visas - and are excited to run them hands-on, not just direct them
• You have strong interpersonal skills; and navigate complexity with honesty, care and discretion
• You have excellent written and verbal communication, and you're comfortable being redirected mid-conversation without losing the thread
• Particularly valuable
• 4+ years running people operations, ideally at a growing startup or nonprofit - candidates with less overall experience or nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to apply and may be considered for similar roles
• Experience personally running searches for highly sought-after technical or research talent (not primarily high-volume, campus, or agency-coordinated recruiting); familiarity with the AI research ecosystem is a plus
• Experience scaling a people function as an organization grows
• Already comfortable using AI or other productivity tools to work effectively - or eager to learn; deep technical skill is not required
• This role is not right for you if: You want to set direction and hand the details to someone else
• You dislike ambiguity and prefer an established playbook
• Employee-relations work drains you
• You're energized by covering a lot of ground in conversation - this role needs someone who reads the room, answers the question asked, and adjusts quickly when redirected
• You're looking for equity or an ownership stake - this is a fixed-salary role with no equity component