People Operations Manager

Honeydew; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid NYC office

Job summary

Honeydew is seeking a People Ops Manager to be the first point of contact for managers and employees across a critical business unit. You’ll shape structure, leveling, performance, development and compliant processes as the company scales.

This IC role has a clear path to leadership as the team grows, focusing on embedding payroll and HR systems, multi-state compliance, and delivering a thoughtful employee experience across a distributed workforce.

Qualifications

• Rapid scale experience in a tech-enabled startup (100–500+ growth).
• Hands-on payroll and systems ownership with Justworks or similar.
• Multi-state wage/leave compliance in practice across states.

Responsibilities

• Coach managers on performance, structure and headcount planning.
• Own HR fundamentals, data, leveling, and admin work for running People well.
• Audit and support compliance with partners and legal entities.

Skills

Rapid scale experience

Payroll ownership

Multi-state compliance

Business acumen

Project management

High EQ

Grit

Creative problem solving

Tools

Justworks

Job description

About Honeydew

No one should suffer from a treatable skin disease because they couldn't access care. That's what Honeydew is fixing — a platform connecting hundreds of millions of people to licensed dermatologists, FDA-approved treatments, and ongoing skin health support. We've helped 40,000+ patients get life-changing results, we're growing 5x YoY, and we're just getting started.

The Opportunity

We're at a critical inflection point, scaling from ~240 to 450+ Honeydoers over the next 14 months. Our leaders have strong beliefs about performance, feedback and growth; your job is to make them real, consistent and scalable.

As a People Ops Manager, you'll be the first call for managers and employees in your part of the business (on team structure, leveling, performance, development and the hard cases in between) while building the systems and documentation that keep us compliant and organized.

Legal and compliance fluency is the foundation we expect you to bring; what we're building here is everything above it. This is an IC role with a clear path to leadership as the team expands. People Operations Managers support primarily these two verticals:

• Care Delivery: partner to our care delivery organization, a largely remote, hourly, non-exempt workforce

• Business: partner to our business teams and providers, primarily exempt, salaried and 1099 population

What You'll Build

At Honeydew, we focus on outcomes over activities.

• Embed in the business (first 30 days): Learn how Honeydew operates: the teams, growth levers and org dependencies. Map your units' structure, cross-team dependencies and top people risks.

• Scale the infrastructure (first 3 months): Audit and formalize our people systems and processes for a doubling of headcount, building from scratch where nothing exists: compensation and promotion cycle infrastructure, benefits administration and open enrollment, employee relations processes, and policies for every state we hire in.

• Uplevel leadership (first 6 months): Support a continuous feedback and performance cycle, and a coaching and training framework that turns "people managers" into "people leaders."

• Be the trusted partner (12 months): Leaders come to you first on structure, leveling and headcount planning, and you resolve most leave and accommodation cases on your own.

What Your Day-to-Day Might Look Like

• Building or improving a tracker, template or workflow that saves the team time down the line

• Leading a cross-functional project from kickoff to rollout, like a new performance review cycle, a leveling framework or a comp benchmarking effort

• Owning a piece of a company-wide initiative, like open enrollment or a new-state policy rollout, and making sure it lands well with your teams

• Pulling data together for an audit, or to spot a trend worth flagging to leadership

• Presenting a process or policy change to managers, and translating "why we're doing this" into something that actually resonates

• Coaching a manager through a tricky performance conversation, attendance question, or through how to keep a top performer engaged

• Answering an employee's benefits or equity vesting question

• Handling offboarding details with care, and advising a manager on how to set a new hire up for success

How You'll Make an Impact

• Advisor and coach: Be a trusted, ongoing partner to the managers in your units, coaching them through the people challenges of running a team, from performance plans to team dynamics and development.

• Employee relations: Bring sound judgment and discretion to sensitive situations, including leave and accommodation requests. Business practical but employee-supportive approach is key.

• Operational backbone: Own HR fundamentals, people data and metrics, leveling and progression frameworks, and the operational and administrative work of running People well. Precision and pride in the details matter here.

• Audit and compliance: Support audits and compliance work alongside internal and external partners, including counsel and our PEO.

• Change management: Lead the organization through the friction of rapid scaling, so process changes land with clarity and buy-in.

• Employee experience: Support employees across their whole time at Honeydew, and shape retention and engagement for a diverse, distributed team, including internal communications, the employee wiki and People team updates.

• Builder: Spot gaps and build better ways of working as the business evolves, using AI to speed up repetitive work like documentation, tracking and reporting.

What We're Looking For

The non-negotiables:

• Rapid scale experience: You've been in the trenches during a 100 to 500+ growth spurt at a tech or tech-enabled startup, and know what breaks at each stage. Ideally more than once.

• Non-exempt expertise in a tech-enabled setting: A significant part of your background is supporting remote, tech-enabled hourly teams alongside salaried knowledge workers. Physical-workforce experience (retail, hospitality, manufacturing) alone isn't the fit.

• Hands-on payroll and systems ownership: You've administered Justworks (or an equivalent PEO) and an HRIS (owned them, not just used them), and you can find and fix a payroll error at its source.

• Multi-state compliance in practice: Wage and hour, leave and accommodations across states, applied with judgment, not recited.

• Business acumen: You connect people decisions to revenue drivers, team dependencies and org design tradeoffs, and speak the language of the teams you support. You see how an individual role fits into the larger picture.

• Project mastery and high standards: You run concurrent workstreams without dropping balls. Done means done, with the details right.

• Creative problem solving: You think like an operator, not the HR handbook. You ask the clarifying question before you answer, and bring solutions with your problems.

• High EQ and grit: You stay steady under pressure and can have hard conversations that leave people feeling supported.

Nice-to-haves:

• AI fluency: you've built AI-powered or agentic workflows and are curious where this is going

• Experience moving international contractors to an EOR

• Healthcare or care-delivery experience

Work Location: This role has strong preference for hybrid to our NYC office, but can be remote for the right candidate.