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Salary: USD 200,000 - 240,000 / annual
Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America, combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing to help aerospace and defense companies build mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost. The company recently closed a $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation and is rapidly expanding manufacturing capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, and additive manufacturing.
The People Operations team builds the infrastructure that enables Hadrian to scale. You will own the headcount planning program end-to-end, serving as the critical link between business demand, Finance, Recruiting, and leadership. This is fundamentally a program management role focused on running a planning cycle that the entire organization trusts and executes against.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the headcount planning program end-to-end, running both bottom-up (from business units) and top-down (from leadership) planning cycles, then consolidating into a single coherent plan
- Partner with engineering and program leadership to translate program demand signals into role-level headcount needs that reflect actual build requirements rather than generic growth curves
- Work closely with Finance to cost the plan, reconcile against budget, and produce a single forecasted headcount picture that all functions align to
- Hand off the finalized plan to Recruiting Operations with clean data structures that enable requisition creation and reporting by program
- Program manage the recurring monthly cadence with embedded People Partners and Recruiting Leads, ensuring program and assignment tagging is reconciled and loaded correctly
- Partner with Workplace Services to align hiring plans with physical capacity expansion across the manufacturing footprint
- Drive change management by building the cadence, intake processes, artifacts, and communications that make headcount planning a trusted program, continuously raising the bar each cycle
- Provide leadership with real-time plan status, early risk flagging, and legible tradeoff analysis to support executive decision-making
The hard part is not the spreadsheet—it is holding a cross-functional cycle together across People, Recruiting, Finance, Engineering, and Program leadership, each with their own pressures and views. You will get people aligned, keep the plan honest as it changes, and drive adoption so the process is actually used rather than worked around.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience spanning management consulting or similar structured problem-solving environment, plus in-house time where you owned a program and lived with the results
- Exceptional stakeholder management: build credibility quickly with senior leaders, hold a line without damaging relationships, and influence people who do not report to you
- Strong project management fundamentals: work from a plan, drive to dates, manage cross-functional dependencies, ensure nothing falls through the cracks
- Real change management experience: have rolled out a process that changed how people work, handled resistance and adoption gaps, and managed communications
- Comfort with planning data and financial mechanics: build and pressure-test workforce models, reconcile against budget, explain deltas in plain language
- Executive-grade communication: write one-pagers that drive decisions and run effective meetings
- High adaptability: energized by shifting scope, bring structure to ambiguity rather than waiting for clarity
Preferred qualifications:
- Have run a workforce or headcount planning cycle before in close partnership with Finance, understanding where these processes typically break
- Experience in high-growth, operationally intense environments (startup, manufacturing, defense, or similar) where you built programs while the business moved at full speed
- Hands-on familiarity with HRIS, ATS, and headcount planning tools such as ChartHop and Excel; understanding that a program is only as good as its data
- Experience supporting engineering or technical organizations and ability to hold your own discussing program requirements
- View People and headcount planning as a business performance lever, not a reactive support function
