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Zeit AI is an autonomous data engineering platform for European mid-market companies. Founded by ex-Palantir engineers, backed by Sequoia Scout and Oxford Seed Fund, the company has grown from zero to €1M ARR in twelve months with six people. They are hiring their first dedicated People & Operations Manager to build the People function from the ground up.
In this role, you will own the entire employee lifecycle and People operations function, reporting directly to the founders (Marvin and Leopold). Your responsibilities span:
**Recruiting & Hiring**: End-to-end recruiting using Ashby, including job postings, sourcing, screening, interview scheduling, feedback collection, and candidate follow-up. You will hire for both technical (engineers) and non-technical roles (sales, ops), ensuring no candidate waits more than a week for a response. You prepare compelling offer slides and manage employment contracts through signature.
**Onboarding & Employee Experience**: Design and execute smooth onboarding covering contracts, equipment provisioning, account setup, and first-week experience. You own interview guides, scorecards, and debrief processes to ensure every applicant—hired or not—leaves with a positive impression of Zeit AI.
**Payroll, Benefits & Compliance**: Run payroll with Project B, manage benefits and insurance, and maintain accurate headcount and cost reporting to finance. You ensure all contracts, policies and processes comply with German and UK employment law, bringing in external counsel when needed.
**HR Systems & Data**: Own People tools and employee records, pulling key metrics (time-to-hire, pipeline health, headcount plans) for founders. You handle visa and relocation support for international hires.
**People Processes & Culture**: Design feedback, performance conversation rhythms and operating cadences with founders. You lead team offsites, events, and office culture.
**Automation**: Identify repetitive People Ops work and automate it rather than just documenting it.
The team is small (currently six people), based in one room in Munich with regular team offsites. This is a hands-on role where every hire shapes the company and the People function you build will scale to 20, 50, and 100 people.
**Requirements:**
- 2+ years in People Operations, Recruiting, HR Generalist, or Talent roles, ideally at a fast-growing startup or scale-up
- Hands-on recruiting experience with an ATS (Ashby preferred; Greenhouse, Lever, Personio, or similar acceptable)
- Solid working knowledge of German and UK employment law, contracts, and payroll processes
- Highly organized with meticulous attention to detail (contracts, payroll, candidate follow-ups)
- Excellent communication skills; ability to adjust tone and approach for senior candidates, new joiners, and founders
- Strong ownership mentality and bias to action; comfortable building processes from scratch
- AI-native: already using AI tools to work faster and excited to automate People processes
- Fluent in German and English
- Based in Munich or willing to relocate (role is in-office by design)
