Senior People Partner

Fonoa; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Fonoa, the Tax Operating System, is hiring a Senior People Partner to work with business leaders in the US and EU. You will own the people relationship for defined leaders, handle performance, coaching, ER, onboarding, and career development, and provide coverage for US employees.

The role sits on a small, high-calibre People team reporting to the Chief People Officer. You will shape the People function as Fonoa scales, bring commercial credibility, and navigate multi-market employment

Qualifications

• Commercial credibility with senior leaders; speaks the language of performance, growth and risk.
• Experience in high-growth, scaling companies.
• Ability to propose third options when faced with simple yes/no answers.
• End-to-end ownership of performance and employee relations cases across jurisdictions.
• Designed at least one People programme from scratch with buy-in and impact.
• Breadth across performance, development, onboarding, or culture programmes.
• Strong ability to triage urgent vs important work across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business leaders as the named People partner for defined leaders and teams.
• Drive performance and accountability; coach managers through difficult conversations.
• Own employee relations end-to-end across markets, ensuring fairness and risk mitigation.
• Design and run people programmes that move the business forward (onboarding, frameworks, culture).
• Provide dedicated People coverage for US and EU employees with working knowledge of employment practices.
• Shape the People function as the company scales and partner with leaders on tough problems.

Skills

Commercial credibility

High-growth experience

How, not yes instinct

Performance & ER in practice

Programme design from scratch

Broad People function experience

Context-switching across teams

US/UK/EU employment knowledge

Job description

Fonoa is the Tax Operating System for autonomous tax. AI that tracks every rule, acts on every obligation, and proves every decision, built on modular infrastructure.

Fonoa's modules cover the full indirect tax lifecycle: tax ID validation, real-time tax determination, e-invoicing, and returns. All on one shared data model and integration, with one audit trail. Each added capability makes the others stronger.

Agents monitor obligations, populate returns, catch anomalies and assemble audit packs in seconds. The system does the work. Humans make the calls. That's autonomous tax.

Trusted by Canva, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Zoom and Booking.com.

Find out more: www.fonoa.com

The role

We're looking for a Senior People Partner to sit alongside business leaders at Fonoa and drive high performance across their teams.

As Senior People Partner at Fonoa, you'll own the business-facing People relationship for a defined set of leaders and their teams. Real partnership. You'll help managers prevent problems before they escal t, move difficult situations forward when they don't, and build the frameworks that make consistency possible as the company scales. The role spans day-to-day partnering, performance, manager coaching, employee relations, onboarding, career development, culture, and engagement. You'll also provide People coverage for our US employees. The expectation is that you find the 'how' when others default to yes or no. This is a senior IC role on a small, high-calibre People team, reporting to the Chief People Officer. We're looking for commercial credibility, personal gravitas, and the breadth to operate across the full scope of a People function in a fast-scaling business.

What you'll do

• Partner with business leaders. Be the named People partner for a defined set of leaders. First point of contact for people issues, performance conversations, team dynamics, and management challenges. Own the relationship, not just the transaction.
• Drive performance and accountability. Help managers set clear expectations, have difficult conversations, and act on issues before they become crises. Coach the manager through it. Don't just advise from the side.
• Own employee relations. Manage ER cases end-to-end across markets, from early intervention through to resolution. Keep things moving, keep things fair, and keep the business out of avoidable risk.
• Build the people programmes. Design and run the programmes that move the business forward: onboarding, career frameworks, manager training, culture, engagement. Make them real, not decorative.
• Cover the US & EU. Provide dedicated People partnering for Fonoa's US & EU employees, with working knowledge of US employment law and practices.
• Shape the function. Help build what the People function looks like as Fonoa scales, and operate as the partner business leaders bring their hardest problems to.

What we're looking for

• Commercial credibility and gravitas. You can hold your own with a CRO, CPO, or founder. You speak the language of the business (performance, output, growth, risk), not the language of HR policy. You've pushed back on a senior leader and can describe specifically what happened.
• High-growth experience. You've operated in a scaling company where the People function was being built rather than maintained.
• A 'how, not no' instinct. When the easy answer is yes or no, you look for the third option. You can walk through a specific example where you helped a leader reach a legitimate outcome through a route they hadn't considered.
• Performance and ER in practice. You've owned performance situations and employee relations cases end-to-end, not just advised on them. You can describe how you support the manager, keep momentum, and bring cases to resolution across multiple jurisdictions.
• Programme design from scratch. You've built at least one people programme from a blank page, not inherited and maintained one. You can describe the problem, the design, the buy-in, and what changed.
• Breadth across the People function. Meaningful work across at least two of: performance frameworks, career development, L&D, onboarding, or culture programmes. Range, not depth in one specialism.
• Strong context-switching. You can manage active situations across multiple teams without dropping things, with a clear method for triaging what's urgent, what's important, and what can wait.
• Working knowledge of US and UK/EU employment. Enough to be the first point of contact for employees and managers across markets without escalating every question to legal.

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