Director of People Operations

The Director of People Operations owns and runs the operational engine of the People function - the operating model and service delivery for the employee lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding, and the transactions in between), the HRIS and people-systems that serve as the function's infrastructure, compliance operations, the people-data reporting and the metric definitions behind it, and the roadmap and portfolio that improves all of it - executed through a team of People Operations managers and specialists. Core ownership is the engine and the operating model that makes people services reliable, compliant, and measurable at scale - the machinery that turns the company's people strategy into consistent, evidenced execution. This seat reports to the VP of People (or the most senior People leader), runs within the people strategy and workforce plan that seat sets, and is the internal-service backbone the HR Business Partners, Payroll, Total Rewards, and Talent Acquisition all rely on. It is not the VP of People, who owns the whole function's strategy, the workforce plan, the compensation philosophy, the executive compliance response, and the board seat, and is this Director's manager; not a People Operations Manager, who runs one team's day-to-day delivery within the operating model this Director designs; and not a Director HRBP, the peer director who leads business partnering for client organizations rather than the ops engine. Performance shows up in service quality and cycle times, people-data trustworthiness, clean compliance and payroll audits, system adoption and reliability, and the ops-controllable contribution to attrition, time-to-hire, and manager effectiveness - with weight on whether the engine keeps working, and keeps getting cheaper and more reliable, as the company grows. What separates great from average at this altitude is building an operating model and a people-systems foundation that run without heroics, not personally clearing the queue faster: lifecycle processes documented, owned, and measured so delivery is a system rather than a set of favors; a governed HRIS with one source of truth and reconciled metric definitions instead of five spreadsheets that disagree; compliance controls designed into the process and evidenced, so an audit is a retrieval and not a scramble; automation applied to the high-volume transaction while a human stays on the exception and the sensitive case; and managers developed to run their teams to the standard, so the Director is reserved for the systems calls, the cross-functional trade-offs, and the genuinely material risk. A mediocre director is the fastest ticket-closer in a function that falls over when they are out; a great one leaves behind an engine, a data foundation, and a bench that outlast them.