People Partner (London) - AI Defence Start Up
This is not a traditional People Partner role.
As People Partner for London, you will be working directly with senior leaders and highly technical teams to shape how the organisation scales.
For the right person, this is a genuine opportunity to influence decisions, set standards, and define what great looks though the scaling journey.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Acting as the on-the-ground People Partner for London; driving clarity, pace, and quality across the People agenda
- Partnering with senior leaders across engineering and GTM to translate strategy into practical people decisions
- Leading performance management and calibration; raising the bar on feedback, accountability, and outcomes
- Operating as a high-conviction sparring partner; challenging leaders on hiring, promotions, org design, and workforce planning
- Owning the end-to-end employee lifecycle; continuously improving for scale, speed, and quality
- Managing complex employee relations with a proactive, root-cause approach
- Ensuring full compliance with UK employment law as the business scales
- Building and optimising People infrastructure; processes, systems, and data to enable better decision-making
- Driving meaningful culture and engagement initiatives that strengthen leadership and inclusion
- Leading key People projects across performance, compensation, org design, and employee experience
What We’re Looking For
- You operate with credibility and impact at senior level; particularly with analytical, high-bar stakeholders
- You have an operator mindset; you take ownership and deliver outcomes, not just advice
- You are structured, pragmatic, and focused on impact over process
- You are comfortable in performance-driven environments; including managing underperformance and difficult decisions
- You’ve partnered with technical teams - engineering, hardware and GTM
- You thrive in demanding environments
- You are proactive, resilient, and bring clarity in fast-moving, ambiguous situations
- Experience in deep-tech, defence, robotics, autonomy, or hardware/software environments
- Background in elite scale-ups
- Familiarity with HRIS platforms such as Personio or HiBob
What's on Offer
- Salary up to 150k plus equity
- Regular company-wide events and offsites
- You enjoy working in-person; this role is based in London with 3 days per week in the office