Founding People Lead: Build an Automated People Function

optiml; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Direct impact on company direction

Ownership of tooling & systems

Growth through leadership exposure

Job summary

Optiml, a Real Estate Decision Intelligence company with hubs in London and Zurich, seeks a Founding People Lead to shape the people function from the ground up. You will design automated systems, recruit across commercial, technical, and operational roles, and build a scalable culture for a distributed team.

You will own onboarding, offboarding, performance reviews, and HR operations end-to-end while partnering with founders and leaders to drive business outcomes.

Qualifications

• 4–7 years in People Ops or HR/recruitment, ideally in startups or fast-paced environments.
• End-to-end ownership of people processes with multiple workstreams.
• Track record in full-cycle recruitment across roles and departments.
• Strong stakeholder management in a distributed team and with founders.
• Business-minded with ability to align people decisions with business needs.
• Experience automating HR workflows using modern tools; equity in operations is a plus.
• Excellent written and spoken English; German is a bonus.
• Based in London or able to work from London with travel to Zurich.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end recruitment across commercial, technical, and operational roles.
• Build and automate onboarding, offboarding and performance workflows using AI-native stacks.
• Own the people tech stack; implement tools and automations to reduce manual admin.
• Design culture rituals, coordinate distributed hub-and-spoke communications, and run offsites.
• Run performance management and continuously automate repeatable parts of HR operations.
• Serve as day-to-day point of contact for employees on culture, wellbeing, and people questions.
• Oversee HR administration and compliance across CH, DE, and UK entities; manage employee relations and compensation administration.

Skills

People Ops

Recruitment

Stakeholder management

English proficiency

German language

Tools

Notion

Slack

AI agents

Job description

Optiml, a Real Estate Decision Intelligence company with hubs in London and Zurich, seeks a Founding People Lead to shape the people function from the ground up. You will design automated systems, recruit across commercial, technical, and operational roles, and build a scalable culture for a distributed team.

You will own onboarding, offboarding, performance reviews, and HR operations end-to-end while partnering with founders and leaders to drive business outcomes.