People Operations Manager

The posting, as Transluce wrote it

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 se

[…]
eople 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.