Senior People Program Manager (m/f/d) - Performance & Growth

About this role:

Your  Mission: Building & Managing the Frameworks for Excellence. 

In this newly created role, directly reporting to the VP People, your intial focus will be to build, scale, and refine our Performance & Talent Enablement engine. You will ensure that our "high bar" for excellence is matched by transparent success matrices, reward logics, and high-velocity growth paths. As we scale, you will eventually expand your scope to lead other strategic People Programs, ensuring that every touchpoint of the vivenu journey is designed for maximum impact.

Your responsibilities will be:

1. Performance, Career & Reward Architecture
• Program Design & Audit: You evolve and manage our performance cycles and growth frameworks to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding organization. You ensure thorough execution by building high-quality growth & feedback loops and leveraging data-driven insights.
• Calibration Leadership: You facilitate and lead performance calibration processes across all departments and the entire organization to ensure company-wide alignment.
• Job Leveling & Career Frameworks: You design, implement, and scale vivenu’s global job leveling and career pathing architecture. You partner with leadership to define clear competency matrices and grading systems, ensuring transparency, equity, and a clear trajectory for talent progression across all departments.
• Total Rewards Integration: You partner closely with Finance and our Founders to continuously evolve our promotion and bonus logic, ensuring we effectively track, recognize, and reward our top performers.
2. Talent Enablement & Growth Execution
• High-Potential Programs: You design and manage tailored development initiatives and "Fast Track" programs to accelerate the growth of our top performers and future leaders.
• Manager Toolkits: You develop enablement programs and operational resources that empower our leads to act as effective coaches. You ensure a consistent leadership experience where high expectations are balanced with high support.
• Closing Skill Gaps: You identify systemic training needs across the organization and launch targeted learning interventions that empower employees to constantly stay ahead of our performance bar.
3. Scaling & Program Evolution
• People Tech Ownership: Own and optimize the digital tools that power our people programs, ensuring the experience is seamless and data-driven for every user.
• Future Program Expansion: Once the performance engine is stabilized, you will take on the design and execution of other key People Programs, acting as a versatile builder for the People Team.
4. Integrated People Experience
• Collaborative Design: Work closely with the broader People Team, e.g. People Partner and People Ops Team, to ensure our performance and growth philosophy is woven into the entire employee lifecycle.

What you need to succeed in this role:

• You bring several years of HR experience, including a minimum of 2 years in a similar strategic role within a high-growth/high-performance environment (Series B/C scale-up experience is a strong plus)
• You have a proven track record of (re)designing and (re)implementing performance and growth systems (e.g., performance feedback cycles, job leveling, career frameworks) 
• You are comfortable with People Analytics. You know how to use data to identify talent trends, measure the impact of your initiatives, and communicate "the state of performance" to the Executive Team.
• You are a confident communicator at all levels in German and English. You act as a strategic partner to the VP People and our Founders.
• You enjoy being part of the daily team life in our Düsseldorf office (5 days a week in year one), using the power of proximity to build relationships and drive initiatives with agility.
• Experience in management consultancy is a plus.