People Operations Lead

About this role

📍 London - Hybrid. 2 days per week in our London office, 3 days remote / work from home (40 hour week) 🚆 Monthly travel to one of our other offices (Sheffield/Lincoln) is essential. ✴ All travel and accommodation costs to non-base office locations are fully covered. We've spent the last three years transforming how our People Team operates. Now we're looking for someone to own the machine and work out what comes next! About the role We're looking for a People Operations Lead to own the operating layer of our People function, managing our People Operations Specialist and reporting directly to our People Director. This isn't a traditional HR Operations role, and we're not looking for someone to simply keep existing processes running. We want someone who's genuinely curious about how and why things work - someone who spots friction, interrogates the data, challenges the way we've always done things and builds something better. You'll inherit a strong foundation. Over the last three years we've streamlined manual processes, invested in our People technology and changed the way our People function operates. There's plenty we're proud of - but we're definitely not done! You'll own our People operations, systems and data infrastructure across the end-to-end colleague lifecycle, making sure the fundamentals run brilliantly while continuously looking for opportunities to simplify, automate and improve them. You'll also take significant ownership of our reward infrastructure, including quarterly pay reviews, salary benchmarking and banding, benefits and gender pay gap reporting. You'll work closely with our People Partners, Talent, Finance, Payroll and Tech teams, so this is a highly collaborative role with influence across Goodlord. And increasingly, you'll help us answer a bigger question: what work should technology be doing for us? We're already exploring how AI and agentic workflows can remove repetitive work across areas such as onboarding, colleague queries, document management, data validation and reporting. You don't need to arrive as an AI expert, but you do need to be excited about the possibilities, willing to experiment and comfortable helping us work out where technology can genuinely make things better. If you get a kick out of taking something that already works, understanding it properly and making it simpler, smarter and better, we'd love to hear from you. Who are you You're probably someone who sees People Operations a little differently. You care about delivering a brilliant colleague experience, but you're just as interested in the systems, data and processes underneath it. You don't accept a seven-step process because it's always had seven steps. You'll want to understand why it's there, whether we still need it and what would happen if we did it differently. What does that mean in practice? You're naturally curious and analytical. You ask good questions, get underneath problems and use data rather than instinct alone to make decisions. You love improving how things work. You've reviewed, redesigned and implemented processes rather than simply inherited and administered them. You're comfortable getting into the detail while still seeing the bigger picture - whether that's interrogating a spreadsheet, configuring a workflow or digging into an HRIS. You're pragmatic, comfortable with ambiguity and a confident collaborator. You can turn an idea into something that actually works and bring people with you when something needs to change. What we need from you Significant People Operations experience, with evidence that you've owned and designed end-to-end People processes, not simply operated processes someone else created. Hands-on experience owning or significantly shaping People systems and data using a modern tech stack, including an HRIS (we use Personio, but we're of course open to others!) and/or headcount planning systems, alongside strong analytical and advanced Excel skills. Experience across reward and benefi

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