HR Operations

aijoblist; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognition AI in San Francisco is seeking an HR Operations Manager to build the HR processes from the ground up. You will own key areas including onboarding, benefits, compliance, and employee relations while managing immigration cases.

This is a unique opportunity to shape core HR functions in a fast-paced environment. Ideal candidates should have over 3 years of experience in HR operations or a related field, strong immigration management skills, and a passion for building effective people processes.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in people operations or HR at a fast-growing startup or tech company.
• Solid foundation across core HR: onboarding, benefits, compliance, and employee relations.
• Practical experience managing US immigration cases, with coordination with outside counsel.

Responsibilities

• Help build and own core HR operations, including onboarding and benefits administration.
• Design scalable HR systems: tracking, playbooks, checklists, and documentation.
• Manage US immigration end to end in close coordination with outside counsel.

Skills

People operations

HR generalist knowledge

US immigration management

Job description

Applied AI Lab Hiring For HR Operations Manager

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. Together, they represent our vision for collaborative AI teammates that enable engineers to focus on more interesting problems and empower teams to strive for more ambitious goals.

Our team is small and talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro.

Building Devin and Windsurf is just the first stepour hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you're excited to solve some of the world's biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.

About The Role

We're growing fast and bringing in world-class talent from around the globe, and we're doing it differently than most. That kind of momentum doesn't run itself. We're hiring someone to build the engine behind it: the HR processes, playbooks, and systems that can scale as fast as we do. This is a rare chance to own real scope early. You'll help build and run our core HR functions from the ground up, including onboarding, benefits, compensation, compliance, and employee relations. You'll also own our immigration program end to end. Along the way you'll solve hard problems, work cases that actually matter to people's lives, and watch the things you build become how the company runs.

In this role you will:

• Help build and own core HR operations, including onboarding, offboarding, benefits administration, and employee relations, and keep them running well
• Design the systems that make this scalable: tracking, playbooks, checklists, and documentation so nothing falls through the cracks
• Manage US immigration end to end (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards) in close coordination with outside counsel.
• Be the steady point of contact for employees navigating visa sponsorship, renewals, and status questions
• Make sure managers are informed before they act, on immigration timelines, compliance requirements, and people processes
• Flex into broader people ops work as needed at a company of our size

Requirements for this role:

• 3+ years in people operations or HR at a fast-growing startup or tech company
• Solid generalist foundation across core HR: onboarding, benefits administration, compliance, employee relations, and policy
• Practical experience managing US immigration cases (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards), including direct coordination with outside counsel

Equal Opportunity

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.