Manager, People Systems and Automation

Cohere; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Lunch stipend

Health benefits

RRSP matching

Parental leave

Vacation days

Home office stipend

Job summary

Cohere is seeking a People Systems and Automation Manager to redesign and automate our HR workflows. You will own the employee lifecycle end to end, reducing manual steps and errors across Rippling, Slack, Notion, and other tools.

This hands-on role offers greenfield influence as Cohere scales, with a focus on scalable, auditable processes. You will design processes, implement automations, and collaborate with IT, Finance and Payroll to close gaps and improve efficiency.

Qualifications

• Experience building People Ops/HR systems at fast-growing companies.
• Experience with HRIS implementation or migration and cost awareness.
• Built workflows and automations in HR systems, familiar with triggers and integrations.
• Ability to design systems with exceptions, not just standard paths.
• Experience coordinating across People, IT, Finance and Payroll.

Responsibilities

• Design and automate People processes across HRIS and tools.
• Own end-to-end employee lifecycle: joiners, movers, leavers.
• Remove manual handling and reduce human error.
• Document SOPs and runbooks for maintainability.
• Build scalable processes for growth and audit readiness.
• Lead and coach a high-performing HR Operations team.

Skills

People systems

HR automation

Process redesign

Workflow automation

Cross-functional coordination

Education

HRIS implementation experience

Tools

Rippling

Notion

Slack

HRIS tooling

Job description

Who are we?

Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems.

We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that.

We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft.

We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

Why this role?

We're hiring a People Systems and Automation Manager to own how our People processes actually run, and to automate them.

Cohere is scaling fast. Our processes were built for a much smaller company and too many of them still depend on someone remembering to do something. That does not hold at the size we're heading toward. A useful lens; this role sees us scale through systems and leverage, not human effort.

This is a hands-on building role. You will redesign processes, build the workflows that execute them across Rippling, Slack, Notion and the rest of our stack, and own offboarding and our employee support model outright. You cannot automate a process well without running one, so you will do both. You will own the outcome, not just the design.

You’ll join a small HR Operations team during our Rippling implementation, which means greenfield opportunity and real influence over how this function works for the next few years.

What you'll do

Design the process, then automate it

• Map how our People processes actually work today, not how they're supposed to

• Redesign them before automating, so we don't lock in problems we already have

• Build workflows and automations across our HRIS and wider tooling

• Design for the exceptions, not just the standard path

Own the employee lifecycle end to end

• Take responsibility for how joiners, movers and leavers are executed. You will be laser focused on removing human interaction in processes.

• Close the gaps between People, IT, Finance and Payroll where work currently falls through.

• Build the internal mobility processes that are often neglected; promotions, transfers, manager changes, entity changes etc.

Remove manual handling and human error

• Find where we’re doing things by hand and take the work out

• Cut down what employees and managers have to ask us for in the first place

• Measure what you’ve removed, in hours, tickets or errors

Document everything

• Write SOPs and runbooks people actually use

• Make sure what you build can be maintained by someone else

• Keep our process documentation as a real source of truth rather than a folder nobody opens

Build for what’s coming

• Design processes that hold as we grow and as we mature toward audit and compliance requirements

• Work with IT and Finance on the controls and evidence our processes need to produce

Manage a team

• Led and developed a high-performing team through regular coaching, feedback, and performance management while maintaining team cohesion and morale

• Managed day-to-day operations and resource allocation for a small team, balancing project priorities, resolving conflicts, and ensuring timely delivery of deliverables within budget constraints

You may be a good fit if you

• Have built People Ops/HR Systems at a company that grew fast, ideally through a doubling

• Have been through an HRIS implementation or migration and know what it costs

• Have personally built workflows and automations in HR systems or adjacent tooling, and are comfortable working with triggers, conditions, integrations and failure modes.

• Think in systems, and can talk about triggers, conditions, failure modes and edge cases

• Know what not to automate, and can explain why

• Write clearly and document by default

• Have run operations across multiple countries and entities, including EOR or contractor populations

• Are comfortable anywhere across the employee journey, from hire to exit

• Pick up new tools quickly and become the person others ask

• Enjoy building elegant solutions to messy operational problems

Bonus if you have

• Worked in Rippling, or implemented it

• People management experience

• Experience with APIs, webhooks or integration tooling

• Been in a company through IPO readiness or SOC 2 and SOX preparation

What we’re not looking for

Someone who wants to keep the lights on. This role exists to change how the work gets done, not to absorb more of it. If your instinct is to add a person when volume grows, this is not the role for you.

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Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:

• A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch.

• Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health.

• RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme.

• 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.

• Annual enrichment benefits:
  Arts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit.
  Education & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.

• 6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!)

• Budget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.

How and Where We Work:

• Cohere is remote-friendly, but we also have offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul with more opening soon.

• For those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.

• For those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.

• Everyone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly.

We strive to create an inclusive work environment for all; we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please submit an Accommodations Request Form, and we will work together to meet your needs.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.

Beware of Scams: Cohere will never ask for payment or third-party services (e.g., CV writing) as part of our hiring process. All legitimate roles are listed on the Cohere careers page and LinkedIn only, with all communications from Cohere employees coming from an @cohere.com or @cw.cohere email alias. If jobs are viewed on other sites then please verify these through our official careers page.