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Salary: USD 78,000 - 111,000 / annual
Sweetgreen is seeking a People Generalist to own the operational and compliance backbone of the employee experience across its Support Center and restaurant organization. This role serves as the day-to-day operational owner for employee relations, leaves of absence, accommodations, workers' compensation, and employment compliance for 5,000+ team members across restaurants.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the complete employee relations case lifecycle from intake through closure, including conducting lower-complexity investigations, supporting People Business Partners and Legal on sensitive matters, drafting corrective action and separation documentation, and maintaining case data and trend reporting to identify emerging patterns.
- Manage and administer leaves of absence and accommodations for field and support center employees, serving as the escalation point on eligibility, pay, duration, and return-to-work matters. Run the interactive dialogue process, manage third-party administrators to service-level agreements, and reconcile weekly advise-to-pay files before payroll processing.
- Partner with Risk and workers' compensation carriers across the claim lifecycle, translating medical work modifications into realistic restaurant accommodations and guiding leaders through return-to-work conversations.
- Own employment compliance programs including I-9 and E-Verify support, audit readiness and remediation, unemployment claims vendor relationships, and labor law posting programs across all markets.
- Execute organizational hierarchy changes while protecting data integrity across People systems. Support performance cycles, engagement surveys, open enrollment, onboarding, and offboarding as a documentation checkpoint before separations.
- Build standard operating procedures, templates, knowledge base content, and workflow automation to enable restaurant teams to resolve routine questions without escalation.
Desired traits include sound judgment with confidential information, clear and precise writing ability, organizational skills under volume, comfort with ambiguity and defensible decision-making, process-mindedness, collaboration, and vendor accountability.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of HR experience with meaningful time in employee relations, leaves administration, or People operations, preferably in multi-unit restaurant, retail, hospitality, or hourly workforce environments
- 3+ years of hands-on administration of leaves of absence (FMLA, state programs, company leaves) and ADA accommodations, including running the interactive process
- Working knowledge of federal and multi-state employment law including FMLA, ADA, FLSA, Title VII, I-9 and E-Verify, wage and hour, and state-specific leave and posting requirements; California, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and Illinois experience preferred
- Experience conducting or supporting workplace investigations and producing documentation that withstands legal review
- Systems fluency across HRIS, case management, and spreadsheets; experience with UKG or comparable HRIS, ServiceNow, ChartHop, Coupa, or leave third-party administrator portals
- PHR/SPHR or SHRM-CP/SCP certification, Spanish fluency, and vendor management experience are a plus
