E2E Recruitment - Own recruiting and hiring end-to-end across commercial, technical, and operational roles
Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements, build structured interview kits, and standardise candidate communication
Build and scale an automated people function - Build and automate onboarding, offboarding, and performance-review workflows using the AI-native stack (Notion, Slack, AI agents)
Own the people tech stack: evaluate and implement tools and automations that cut manual admin
Grow and protect the culture - Design and own culture rituals and communication systems that work across a distributed, hub-and-spoke team
Plan and help run team offsites and culture initiatives
Run performance management (30/60/90s, probation reviews) and continuously automate the repeatable parts
Act as the day-to-day point of contact for employees on culture, wellbeing, and people questions
Run HR operations and compliance - Own HR administration and compliance across the CH, DE, and UK entities: contracts, amendments, employee records, and local employment law, partnering with the Head of Operations
Manage day-to-day employee relations - performance concerns, grievances, and sensitive situations - escalating appropriately
Support compensation and benefits administration: salary reviews, benchmarking, and benefits setup and renewal across entities

4-7 years in People Ops or Engineering, HR or Recruitment, including time in a startup or high-paced environment - or a strong track record in an adjacent field (operations, consulting, founder's office) with a genuine pull toward people and culture work
Proven ownership of a full people function or key processes end-to-end: you have built structure from scratch without a roadmap and kept several workstreams running in parallel
Track record owning full-cycle recruiting across different roles and departments: sourcing, screening, and closing
Strong stakeholder management and experience in building trusted relationships across a distributed team and with founders
Business acumen, understanding the business model, stage, and priorities, and make people and hiring decisions from the business need backwards
Builder mentality: Using AI tools daily in your own workflow and are energized by removing manual, repeatable work
Strong written and verbal English
Based in or able to work from London, and willing to travel to Zurich and offsites

German as a nice-to-have
Track record setting up and improving HR operations end-to-end: HRIS, processes, policies, and compliance is ideal

Direct impact: Play a critical role in scaling a company transforming how real estate decarbonizes
Ownership: Build and own the people function's tooling and systems from scratch, not inherit someone else's stack
Growth: Work closely with leadership and gain exposure across all company functions
Culture: Join a mission-driven, high-performance, distributed team you will help shape
Learning and development budget

Hybrid — Zurich, London

Optiml is hiring a Founding People Lead (m/f/d)