Head of People

Smart Bricks; Dubai; On-site; AED 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Equity package

Learning & conference budget

Flexible working

Access to latest AI models

Job summary

Smart Bricks is seeking a Head of People to build the organisation as we scale across Dubai, London and San Francisco. You’ll own the full employee lifecycle from hiring to offboarding, collaborating closely with the Founder on its toughest people decisions.

You’ll shape culture, compensation, leadership development and organisational design, while embedding data-driven people practices to attract and retain exceptional talent in a fast-growing AI real estate company.

Qualifications

• 7+ years across People, Talent or organisational leadership in high-growth technology companies.
• Built or materially scaled a People function at a fast-growing startup or scaleup.
• Strong track record of recruiting exceptional technical and commercial talent.
• Worked directly with founders and senior leadership teams.
• Deep understanding of compensation, equity, performance management and organisational design.
• Built teams across multiple countries or jurisdictions, ideally across the Middle East, UK and US.
• Excellent judgement on sensitive people decisions, with the emotional intelligence and willingness to have difficult conversations.

Responsibilities

• Own our global talent strategy and pipelines across Dubai, London and San Francisco.
• Find and recruit exceptional people who aren’t actively looking for their next role.
• Personally lead searches for critical and executive hires.
• Build a recruiting process that is fast, rigorous and designed to find exceptional people, not fill vacancies.
• Define organisational design and leadership hires as we scale.
• Build lightweight but rigorous systems for goals, feedback, reviews and career development.
• Develop our global compensation philosophy across salary, bonus and equity.
• Protect and strengthen culture across offices, countries and time zones.

Skills

People leadership

Executive search

Talent acquisition

Organizational design

Cross-border hiring

Compensation & equity

Job description

Head of People

Build the Company Behind AI for Real Estate

Location:

Dubai, UAE (in-office)

Reports to:

Founder & CEO

About Smart Bricks

Smart Bricks is the leading Applied AI Lab for global real estate.

Real estate is the largest asset class on earth, and the last one without an AI-native stack. We’re building that stack for institutions: proprietary real estate models, 1,000+ specialised AI agents and an execution layer that compresses a six-month investment cycle into minutes.

Every client gets a Client Brain built from their own mandate, methodology and deal history. Specialist agents are assembled per opportunity, and every task is routed to the best model across 30+ frontier models and our own fine-tuned real estate models. The output is finished work an investment committee can act on.

We start with institutional funds (private equity, REITs, family offices and sovereign wealth), expanding to banks, lenders, developers and brokerages.

We’ve raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world’s leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.

Our Founder is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout, helping identify and back the next generation of AI founders globally.

We’re building our founding leadership team across Dubai, London and San Francisco. We’re remote-first with no single HQ, and our teams work in person from each hub.

Why exceptional people join us

Raised $5M+, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars

Building across Dubai, London and San Francisco

Remote-first, no single HQ, teams working in person from each hub

Founder recognised as Forbes 30 Under 30 and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout

Building Applied AI with leading institutional real estate organisations

Shape the organisation from the earliest stage

Why this role?

We’re not hiring an HR manager.

We’re hiring a company builder who believes talent density is one of the biggest competitive advantages a technology company can have. You’ll own the full employee lifecycle, from finding and closing exceptional people through onboarding, performance, compensation, development, retention and offboarding, and you’ll work directly with the Founder on the hardest organisational questions that come with scaling fast.

On any given day, you could spend the morning closing a world-class AI researcher, the afternoon redesigning the organisation with the CEO, and the evening helping a manager through a difficult performance conversation.

If you want to shape what kind of company Smart Bricks becomes, this is it.

What you’ll build

Talent.

Make Smart Bricks a magnet for exceptional people across AI, engineering, product, design, commercial and operations:

• Own our global talent strategy and pipelines across Dubai, London and San Francisco
• Find and recruit exceptional people who aren’t actively looking for their next role
• Personally lead searches for critical and executive hires
• Build a recruiting process that is fast, rigorous and designed to find exceptional people, not fill vacancies

Talent density.

Keep the bar exceptionally high as we grow. Define what exceptional performance looks like here, reward it, and catch underperformance early. Headcount growth is never the objective: we’d rather have a smaller team of exceptional people than a larger team of average ones.

Organisational design.

Partner with the Founder on how Smart Bricks is structured as it scales: which functions we need, where they sit and when leadership hires become necessary. Build clear ownership, keep teams fast and intentionally small, and spot organisational bottlenecks before they become company bottlenecks.

Performance & leadership.

Build lightweight but rigorous systems for goals, feedback, reviews and career development. Give managers the tools to have difficult conversations quickly and constructively. Coach leaders as they move from managing small teams to building organisations, and grow the next generation of leaders from inside Smart Bricks.

Compensation & equity.

Develop our global compensation philosophy across salary, bonus and equity so we can compete for the best technology talent anywhere. Build clear bands with room for extraordinary candidates, help employees understand the value and mechanics of their equity, and reward impact over tenure.

Culture.

Protect what makes an early-stage company powerful (speed, ambition, ownership, curiosity and extremely high execution standards) and keep it coherent across offices, countries and time zones. Build rituals that reinforce it without adding bureaucracy. Culture is shaped by who gets hired, promoted, rewarded and retained, not by words on a wall.

People operations & analytics.

Build the foundation of a global company:

• Employment infrastructure, contracts, policies, benefits, immigration and mobility
• Professional, compliant operations in every jurisdiction where we employ people
• Automated processes that remove friction rather than add it
• Visibility across hiring velocity, quality of hire, retention, performance, compensation and engagement, so problems surface before they become obvious

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months you’ll have:

• Raised our hiring bar and materially strengthened our ability to recruit exceptional people.
• Filled critical roles faster without compromising quality.
• Given every manager clear expectations and the tools to meet them.
• Built a system where high performers know they can build extraordinary careers here, and underperformance is addressed quickly.
• Structured compensation and equity intelligently across markets.
• Given leadership real visibility into organisational health.
• Made our culture stronger, not weaker, as we grew.

Success won’t be measured by policies written or headcount added. It will be measured by whether exceptional people actively want to work here.

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone who believes People should make a company perform better, not just more organised. You obsess over talent density, and you know when process creates leverage and when it just creates bureaucracy.

Specifically, you’ll likely have:

• 7+ years across People, Talent or organisational leadership in high-growth technology companies.
• Built or materially scaled a People function at a fast-growing startup or scaleup.
• A strong track record of recruiting exceptional technical and commercial talent.
• Worked directly with founders and senior leadership teams.
• Deep understanding of compensation, equity, performance management and organisational design.
• Built teams across multiple countries or jurisdictions, ideally across the Middle East, UK and US.
• Excellent judgement on sensitive people decisions, with the emotional intelligence and willingness to have difficult conversations.
• Strong analytical instincts and comfort using data to make organisational decisions.

You’re comfortable challenging founders and executives when the organisation needs something different, and you move between strategy and execution without hesitation.

Experience in AI or frontier technology companies is particularly valuable.

Compensation & Benefits

• highly competitive salary
• meaningful equity package
• private healthcare
• annual learning and conference budget
• flexible working
• access to the latest AI models and tooling

How We Work

We hold exceptionally high standards. We start with customer problems, not features, move quickly without compromising quality, default to ownership, challenge assumptions respectfully and stay relentlessly curious. We optimise for outcomes, not process and hierarchy.

Why Join

We move insanely fast, with real rigour and standards, to build a category-defining AI company for the world’s largest asset class.

Building the technology is only half of it. We also need to build the organisation capable of delivering it. You’ll work directly with the Founder & CEO and leadership team, and influence who joins, how teams are built, how leaders develop and how performance is measured. Few People roles offer that level of influence.

If you’re the type to get out of bed to build the company, not just the People function, Smart Bricks is the place for you. We’d love to talk.