Head of People

LILT AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

LILT is seeking a strategic People leader to scale our global team and advance enterprise AI initiatives. You will report to the CEO and join the Exec Ops Team, spearheading recruiting, operations, compliance, and employee relations across regions.

You’ll build builder-coaches who shape AI systems while fostering a high-performance, healthy workplace with hands-on leadership and cross-cultural collaboration.

Qualifications

• Autodidact for markets: market at intersection of enterprise AI, AI data, and human operations.
• Proven growth-stage tech experience: startup with growth expectations from Tier 1 investors.
• International leadership: 50% of workforce in Europe, contractors in LATAM and APAC.
• (highly preferred) Evaluating and integrating teams via acquihires and/or small acquisitions.

Responsibilities

• Report to the CEO and be a member of the Exec Ops Team.
• Spike in recruiting / talent and define what good looks like in operations, compliance, and employee relations.
• Curate and develop builder-coaches who build and manage AI systems.

Skills

Talent / recruiting

Hands-on operator

Strategic communicator

Education

BA / BS

Job description

About LILT

AI is changing how the world communications — and LILT is leading that transformation. We're on a mission to make the world's information accessible to everyone, regardless of the language they speak. We use cutting-edge AI, machine translation, and human-in-the-loop expertise to translate content faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively without compromising on brand, voice, or quality. At LILT, we empower our teammates with leading tools, global collaboration, and growth opportunities to do their best work. Our company virtues—Work together, win together; Find a way or make one; Dance in the customer's shoes; Quicker than they expect; Quality is Job 1—guide everything we do. We are trusted by Intel Corporation, Canva, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, ASICS, and hundreds of global Enterprises. Backed by Sequoia, Intel Capital, and Redpoint, we’re building a category-defining company in a $50B+ global translation market being redefined by AI.

The People Team at LILT LILT’s people team has the dual mandate of cultivating and sustaining a workplace that is both healthy and high-performance. By high-performance we mean courageous, committed, and capable leaders and a talent strategy that constantly increases density. By healthy we mean that Liltonians feel challenged, stimulated, and rewarded for setting and achieving the most ambitious goals of their career.

Where You’ll Work

This position is based in our SF Bay Area office and will be expected to work in the office in a hybrid capacity. Boston and Indianapolis are also acceptable locations. LILT is hybrid with hubs in SF, NY, Indianapolis, Boston, London, and Berlin.

Authorization to work in the U.S. is a precondition of employment.

• SF Bay Area (highly preferred)
• Others: Boston, New York, Indianapolis

About The Role

With blue-chip enterprise customers and a robust pipeline of both AI and modern software innovation, LILT seeks a courageous and strategic People leader. You will report to the CEO and be a member of the Exec Ops Team. You spike in recruiting / talent and know what good looks like in operations, compliance, and employee relations. You will be curating and developer a group of builder-coaches who build and manage AI systems.

Desired Experience

• Autodidact for markets: Our market is at the intersection of enterprise AI, AI data, and human operations. This requires highly specialized personnel that you’re able to recruit, evaluate, and develop.
• Proven growth-stage tech experience: This won’t be your first startup with the growth expectations of Tier 1 investors. Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business goals into actionable people strategies.
• International leadership: 50% of our workforce is in Europe, and we have contractors in LATAM and APAC. Developing cohesive teams across very different work cultures isn’t new for you.
• (highly preferred) Evaluating and integrating teams via acquihires and/or small acquisitions.

Skills

• Talent / recruiting genius: your zone of genius is recruiting and developing niche talent. Our business requires a unique blend of operating rigor, extreme quality control, and flexibility.
• Builder and hands-on operator: strategy is only half the job. You'll be building and running the People function with your own hands — writing the policies, driving the review cycle, and solving the day-to-day issues directly, not just setting direction for a team to execute. You're energized by doing the work, not only shaping it.
• Strategic communicator: you know how to own and shape the narrative through the layers of leadership and down to ICs. Your written and oral communications would impress the head of PR!

Knowledge

• Operator mindset: you know all of the roles/processes/tools in the People function and what good looks like for each.
• Excited about in-office: we’re in-office three days a week. You’re stoked about this and have lots of ideas for building an energetic, generative in-office experience.
• Managing workplace health and flourishing as a product: you can articulate a plan for iterating on and improving the workplace health and vitality so that we’re the most compelling place to work in our market.

Qualities

• Find a way or make one: Our core virtue. You own it and solve it; nothing is somebody else's problem; you don't wait for a playbook — you build one. This is the single trait most predictive of success at LILT.
• Uncompromising Integrity: congruence among your values, actions, and words, and you expect this from everyone around you.
• Relationship builder: relational orientation to building trust across both the executive leadership team and with the broader team.
• Truthseeking: demands candid truths vs. kind lies.
• High Agency / Relentless: you can get in the mud, resolve the messy problems, and by doing so you become a trusted confidant of both executives and employees.
• Competitive: you know that high performance begets high performance, and your whole strategy and vision are oriented around cultivating high performance and human flourishing.
• High Business IQ: you work backward from a thorough understanding of the business and its goals to the People strategy.

Education

• Minimum of a BA / BS.

Our Story

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. While together at Google, they were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company.The quality just wasn’t there. So they set out to build something better. LILT was born.

LILT has been a machine learning company since its founding in 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so LILT assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, LILT has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, human-in-the-loop systems, and now agentic AI.

With AI innovation accelerating and enterprise demand growing, the next phase of LILT’s journey is just beginning.

What Sets Our Platform Apart

• Brand-aware AI that learns your voice, tone, and terminology to ensure every translation is accurate and consistent
• Agentic AI workflows that automate the entire translation process from content ingestion to quality review to publishing
• 100+ native integrations with systems like Adobe Experience Manager, Webflow, Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive to simplify content translation
• Human-in-the-loop reviews via our global network of professional linguists, for high-impact content that requires expert review

LILT in the News

• Featured in The Software Report’s Top 100 Software Companies!
• LILT makes it onto the Inc. 5000 List.
• LILT’s continues to be an intellectual powerhouse, holding numerous patents that help power the most efficient and sophisticated AI and language models in the industry.
• Check out all our news on our website.

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