About Light
Light is a Smart Financial Platform (an SFP; not ERP - read our manifesto) set to make it easy, efficient, and transparent for multinational tech companies to manage their finances.
Come join one of Europe's strongest FinTech teams with people from Pleo, Juni, Google, X, AWS, Spotify, Klarna, etc. who are building a new category.
Visa sponsorship is NOT available at this time
This Head of People role is focused on
- Performance Reviews: designing and running a transparent, impactful process that helps high-performers thrive and keeps expectations clear.
- Compensation Strategy: reviewing compensation across the company, making adjustments where needed, and building a scalable global compensation structure.
- Talent Strategy: working closely with Talent Acquisition on an ambitious hiring plan to scale the team across Europe and beyond.
- Employment Compliance: ensuring Light operates with compliance across multiple jurisdictions, keeping contracts, policies, and practices consistent and fit-for-purpose as we scale (with external legal support).
- Onboarding: building and running a world-class onboarding process that gets every new connected with people and productive from day one.
- Leadership Partnering: supporting Light’s leadership team with org design, people development, and scaling best practices.
- Culture and Starsite: ensuring our values and hybrid ways of working scale with us, and leading the planning and organisation of our Starsite offsites so they become a core part of Light’s culture.
How you fit into the team
You will be Light’s first Head of People, owning the people strategy end-to-end. This is not a classic HR role. It is about building a high-performance culture, creating a world-class employee experience, and designing systems that scale with growth. You will report directly to leadership and be a key partner shaping how Light grows its team globally.
Your qualifications could be
- 4 - 7 years of experience in People, HR, or Talent roles, ideally in high-growth tech or FinTech scale-ups.
- Strong track record building performance review systems that help teams grow.
- Experience designing and implementing compensation structures across multiple markets.
- Proven ability to create and execute hiring strategies with TA teams, scaling from dozens to hundreds of employees.
- Experience building and running onboarding processes across an organisation.
- Good working knowledge of employment compliance across the UK and Europe.
- Trusted advisor to leadership with excellent communication skills.
- Highly pragmatic: you know when to add structure and when to keep it lean.
Bonus points
- Experience working in multinational or distributed teams.
- Exposure to EU employment law or global frameworks
- Background in leadership coaching, L&D, or scaling culture across geographies.
- Experience organising company offsites or large-scale team events.
- Built People functions from 0 to 1 in a startup.
Hiring process
- Intro chat with our Chief of Staff
- Interview with two future colleagues
- Interview with Investors
- Leadership interview
- Offer
Tips to stand out
- Show how you have balanced structure and startup agility in past roles.
- Share concrete examples of comp systems, onboarding, or hiring strategies you have designed.
- Highlight experience with employment compliance in fast-scaling environments.
- Share examples of culture-building initiatives or offsites you have led.
- Be specific: show results in retention, engagement, hiring velocity, or onboarding impact.
- Tell us why you want to help shape Light’s people strategy at this stage.
While this is the good stuff
In addition to being part of a great team and working in a really fun and innovative environment, we offer:
💸 Competitive salary + stock options in our fast-growing startup
🍼 Paid parental leave
🏝 25 days of annual leave + public holidays (in your country)
🥳 Regular socials and company off-sites.
🚀 A huge opportunity for career growth as you will help shape a market-defining product
The famous last words
Working at Light means you are embarking on an exciting journey to reshape the future of multinational financial operations. Our cheat-code is that we have built something like this before and are now doing it again, only better. Our goal is to make global finance effortless and empower companies to make informed decisions.
🚀 Join the rocket ship while it is taking off 🚀
Cherry Ventures is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.
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What We Do
Cherry Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm led by a team of entrepreneurs with experience building fast-scaling companies such as Zalando and Spotify. The firm backs Europe's boldest founders, usually as their first institutional investor, and supports them in everything from their go-to-market strategy and the scaling of their businesses. Cherry Ventures has previously invested in the seed stage of over 90 companies across Europe, including FlixBus, Auto1 Group, Flaschenpost, Forto, SellerX, Juni, and Flink. Cherry Ventures is located in London, Berlin, and Stockholm.
