People Strategy & Operations

January; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

January is seeking a People Strategy & Operations Lead in New York to design and govern the HR operating foundation. You will own the full employee lifecycle, support performance and compensation cycles, and coordinate visa cases with outside counsel.

You will also drive HR operations, vendor relationships, and automation to scale while preserving a strong employee experience. You’ll build reporting across HRIS and payroll, define success metrics, partner with Legal and IT, and lead initiatives

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in HR/People Operations

Responsibilities

• Own the employee lifecycle end to end, from onboarding to exit.
• Own HR’s operational core and build scalable infrastructure.
• Own people data and analytics to improve the employee experience.

Job description

Collections today works like an emergency room. The doctors carry too many patients, everyone arrives at their worst moment, and nobody has their chart. We're making it primary care. January personalizes interactions and optimizes decisions across every stage of consumer credit. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.

Most consumers want to pay what they owe. They want a way out, not a break. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged‑off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. Those consumers rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more because we collect more and charge less.

Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to make someone's hardest financial moment more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow.

As our People Strategy & Operations Lead, you’ll build the systems, programs, and infrastructure that enable January to scale without compromising the employee experience. You’ll own the operating foundation of our people function, from core HR operations to the programs and analytics that help us continuously improve how we work. Your mission is to make the employee experience seamless, thoughtful, and scalable so our people can focus on doing their best work as the company grows.

About the Role

You'll own the employee lifecycle end to end, from the moment someone accepts an offer through the day, if it comes, that they leave. You'll support the semi‑annual performance cycle and the annual comp cycle, manage leaves and accommodations, and be the continuous link between outside counsel and any employee working through a visa case — work that exists because we go after exceptional talent regardless of where it comes from.

This role covers three broad areas:

• Designing and executing the key moments in the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to exit, treating each one as a repeatable program with clear owners, timelines, and success metrics designing new hire onboarding start to finish with Recruiting and hiring managers, operating the performance and comp cycles as cross‑functional programs with defined milestones and stakeholder alignment, executing offboarding and advising managers through involuntary terminations, and creating the systems that answer the team's pay, benefits, and policy questions.

• Owning HR’s operational core and building the infrastructure to scale: running HR operations with the rigor of a program owner, including compliance, benefits and Open Enrollment, immigration and visa casework, leave and accommodations, biweekly payroll, HR technology and vendor relationships, and investing in automation and self‑service systems that reduce manual work and scale with the company.

• Owning people data and analytics to continuously improve the employee experience: building trusted reporting and actionable insights across HRIS, payroll, and employee data; defining success metrics for key people programs; and using trends and outcomes to identify opportunities, inform decisions, and continuously improve how employees experience the company.

This is a role for someone who treats process as the product — who builds the documentation and systems that let this function scale with headcount instead of straining under it, and who gets the technical details exactly right, every time. You are a force multiplier: you identify the highest‑leverage problems across the company’s people systems, scope them, sequence them, and drive them to measurable outcomes.

What We Need

• You read a messy, high‑stakes situation and reach the right call without a clean rule to point to — and you update your read when new facts come in instead of defending your first conclusion

• You think in systems and tradeoffs: given an ambiguous, cross‑functional problem, you scope it, prioritize it against everything else competing for attention, and drive it to a shipped outcome

• You shift registers fluidly: the warm first contact on someone's first day, the steady presence in a hard conversation, the plain‑English translator between an anxious employee and a lawyer's fine print — sometimes in the same afternoon

• You know the difference between a call that's yours to make and one that needs to go up or across — and you elevate deliberately, through the right channel, not reflexively

• You get the technical details exactly right on work with real legal exposure — a visa classification, a leave calculation, a filing deadline — because you know a small error here doesn't stay small

• You pick up work nobody owns and carry it to a real outcome, not a status update, and you leave behind a process your successor can run without you

• You build collaborative working relationships with Legal, IT, Finance, and outside counsel, and know exactly where HR's call ends and someone else's begins

• You’re data‑fluent: you define the metrics, build the dashboards, and turn HRIS and payroll data into recommendations leadership can act on

• You surface a gap before anyone asks — a missed filing, a stalled case, a ticket sitting with the wrong owner

• You hear what someone actually needs underneath what they're asking for, and you fix the system, not just the one instance in front of you

• 3+ years of experience in HR/People Operations

• Nice‑to‑have: experience with Rippling, Sequoia

How We Work

• Decentralization beats control. The best calls get made by the people closest to them, not routed up a chain. You'll set the standards that let the team decide without you in the room.

• Speed beats perfection. You run tight loops, act at 70% on reversible calls and adjust as you learn. Fast loops beat slow ones.

• Candor beats comfort. You'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes everyone's time.

• Writing beats the average meeting. Clarity scales.

• AI runs through everything here. We built our own code reviewer that beats the alternatives. Our voice AI handles most inbound calls with zero hallucinated payments. Engineers ship 3‑4x the PRs they used to. You'll push it further into the work than almost any company you've worked at.

• We operate at every altitude. No one here lives only on Mount Olympus, not even the leaders. We get into the trenches to learn the ground truth, then refine our information flows so ground truth climbs as fast as direction comes down.

• We build in person, at least three days a week in our office in Nolita, with a growing group coming in every day. Random run‑ins cross‑pollinate ideas. Face time builds trust no thread can. Building alongside people makes work far more fun.

As a New York City‑based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.