The Role
Build and run Transluce’s People Operations function as the first dedicated people professional. Responsibilities include end-to-end hiring, sourcing strategy, onboarding, benefits, payroll, HRIS ownership, employee relations, culture practices, and federal and multi-state employment compliance. The role advises leadership, manages vendors and external counsel, handles visa processes, and develops scalable people infrastructure while remaining highly hands-on.
Summary Generated by Built In
Salary range: $150,000 - $200,000/year depending on experience + comprehensive benefits.
Description: Today's AI systems are difficult to understand — even experts struggle to predict behaviors like blackmail or sycophancy. And most analyses of AI systems are done behind closed doors, by the same labs deploying them. Society cannot rely on AI developers to grade their own homework.
Transluce is a non-profit research lab building world-class tools to oversee AI and steer its development for the public good. We use AI to investigate AI, at a scale manual testing cannot reach, and we build in public so anyone can use what we make. We are growing from 20 to 40+ employees in the next 12 months.
About the role: Our team is our most important asset. So hiring well, keeping the people we hire, and building a place worth staying are among the highest-leverage things we do. We are looking for a People Operations Manager to be the first person at Transluce whose whole job is people.
Hiring is the most urgent piece because half the people who will work here a year from now have not been hired yet. Who we hire and how fast we find them determines how quickly we progress our technical ambitions. In tandem, you’ll be responsible for embedding our culture: we want our 40-person team to be not just bigger, but better. So, we need to design good practices and systems now: how to welcome people, how to solicit feedback, and how to get people what they need. If we get things right now, the benefits compound for all future employees.
We have a solid operational foundation (e.g., HRIS, benefits, ATS), but a lot of what works for 20 people will not work for 40+. Your role is to decide what gets built and in what order, so we get ahead of problems rather than repairing them. Strategy and execution are not separable here: the systems you design are the ones you run, and the judgment calls you make are informed by your hands-on experience. Since we are a very small team, you may also flex into other operational domains, further expanding your skillset.
This is an individual-contributor role reporting to the Chief of Staff. You will steward and mature our People Operations function, directly advising the leadership team on key directional decision-making. We expect to continue expanding the operations team. You would help define these roles and hire for them.
You are ...
- Energized by building a whole domain and ready to be the core person accountable for its excellence
- Opinionated about how hiring, development, culture, and compliance should work—and eager to apply and test those best practices in our specific context
- As invested in running a process well as in designing it
- Observant and relentless. You are unable to leave a broken process alone. You notice the friction and fix it
- Able to catch the error in a payroll run while still thinking about what we need to build next quarter
- Trusted by colleagues to be a listening ear and to handle sensitive situations well
Core responsibilities: You will build our people operations infrastructure and drive its day-to-day execution including deciding where to automate, streamline, or outsource.
- Hiring: you enable Transluce’s growth by ensuring we can hire the best people
- Own our hiring process end-to-end and run it: candidate communications, scheduling, program management, and funnel analysis
- Shape our sourcing strategy (channels, events, partners, outreach) to increase the quality of our top of funnel
- People: You design the employee experience from recruitment to last day
- Develop seamless onboarding practices, providing new employees with everything they need in their first week rather than their first month
- Own our benefits, payroll, and HRIS: run them yourself, decide which vendors we use and when we switch, and be the person the team trusts with questions about any of it
- Establish the policies and practices that keep our culture strong as we grow: candid feedback, continuous learning, and clear expectations for what good work looks like.
- Advise managers and employees through sensitive people situations, including performance concerns, conflict, feedback, and other employee-relations issues
- Compliance: You own our federal and multi-state employment compliance. You draw the line between what we handle in-house and what you escalate to outside counsel and our HR providers.
- Make the calls that carry real risk: leaves, accommodations, and how we classify employees and contractors
- Meet the deadlines that cannot slip: visa cases with external counsel, business licenses, state registrations, required trainings and postings
Minimum qualifications
- Has owned hiring rounds end to end alongside hiring managers, with a strong foundational understanding of HR fundamentals
- Has owned core people operations (payroll, benefits, onboarding, visas) and is excited to run them hands-on
- Strong interpersonal skills with demonstrated ability to navigate complexity with honesty, care, and discretion
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Preferred qualifications
- At least 4 years of professional experience including running people operations, ideally at growing startups or nonprofits. Candidates with less overall experience or nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to apply and may be considered for similar roles
- Experience recruiting highly sought-after technical or research talent; familiarity with the AI research ecosystem is a plus
- Experience scaling a people function as an organization grows
- Already leverages AI and other productivity tools to work effectively or eager to learn. Deep technical skills not required.
This role might not be for you if …
- you want to set direction and hand the details to someone else
- you dislike ambiguity and prefer having an established playbook to work from
- employee relations drains you.
We work from our San Francisco office four days a week: our in-person culture is a big part of what makes Transluce special. We are open to sponsoring international visas for exceptional candidates.
Skills Required
- Experience owning hiring rounds end to end alongside hiring managers
- Strong foundational understanding of HR fundamentals
- Experience owning core people operations, including payroll, benefits, onboarding, and visas
- Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to navigate complexity with honesty, care, and discretion
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- At least four years of professional experience, including running people operations
- Experience at growing startups or nonprofits
- Experience recruiting highly sought-after technical or research talent
- Familiarity with the AI research ecosystem
- Experience scaling a people function as an organization grows
- Experience leveraging AI and other productivity tools, or eagerness to learn
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The Company
What We Do
Transluce is an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding AI systems and steering them in the public interest. Transluce means to shine light through something to reveal its structure. Today’s complex AI systems are difficult to understand—not even experts can reliably predict their behavior once deployed. Given AI's extraordinary consequences on society, we need scalable and open analyses of the capabilities and risks of AI systems. We are building open source, AI-driven tools to understand and analyze AI systems. We will apply these tools to open-weight models, so the world can vet our analyses and improve their reliability. Once our technology has been vetted, we will work with frontier AI labs and governments to ensure that internal assessments reach the same standards as our publicly vetted procedures. Email: [email protected]
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