People Strategy & Operations

january; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

January seeks a People Strategy & Operations Lead to build systems and programs that scale the employee experience across the lifecycle, from onboarding to exit.

You’ll own core HR operations, payroll, benefits, immigration and policy questions, driving continuous improvement and automation to support rapid company growth.

Qualifications

• Design and run end-to-end employee lifecycle programs (onboarding to exit).
• Build scalable HR processes with clear owners, timelines and KPIs.
• Partner with Recruiting, Legal, Payroll and Ops to align policies and cycles.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute onboarding to exit programs with owners, milestones and metrics.
• Operate performance and compensation cycles with cross-functional teams.
• Oversee HR operations: payroll, benefits, immigration, leaves, Open Enrollment, and vendor relations.

Skills

HR operations

Program management

Systems thinking

Data analytics

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

HRIS

Payroll systems

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 lift...

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