Director of People Partnerships

What You’ll Do

We’re looking for a Director of People Partnerships who is energized by two things in equal measure: developing the people on their team and making the leaders around them measurably better. This is first and foremost a builder role. You'll be establishing how people partnerships work at Tekmetric — the frameworks, the operating rhythms, the standards — while simultaneously leading the team that delivers it. The org doesn't exist yet in its full form. You're the one who creates it.

You’ll manage and develop a team of 2–3 People Partners embedded across our GTM, Customer, R&D and G&A divisions, while personally owning senior leader relationships and escalated employee matters. You set the standard for what great people partnership looks like at Tekmetric and build a team that delivers it consistently.

This role sits at the intersection of people strategy and business execution. You’ll report to the VP of People & Culture and partner closely with the Director of People Operations, Sr. Director of Talent Acquisition, and Head of Employee Experience to build a People function that is a genuine competitive advantage as Tekmetric scales toward 200M ARR and beyond.

You will focus on these areas:

• Own the Talent Architecture. Design and maintain a rigorous approach to org design, workforce planning, and succession planning across all divisions. That means knowing which roles are single points of failure, where leadership pipelines are thin, and how headcount decisions today shape organizational capability six months from now — and bringing that picture to leadership before they ask for it.
• Lead and develop the People Partnerships team. Manage, coach, and develop 2–3 People Partners, setting the standard for what great people partnership looks like at Tekmetric — then building a team that delivers it consistently across every division.
• Own the most complex work yourself. This is a player-coach role. You’ll personally own senior leader relationships, and escalated situations, not because your team can’t, but because that’s how you develop them and stay close to the business.
• Build the manager capability of the entire organization. You will help execute how we develop leaders at Tekmetric — calibrations, succession planning, performance rigor, and coaching frameworks — and ensure your team executes it with consistency and quality across every division.
• Diagnose what’s actually going on. Use engagement data, attrition signals, and pattern recognition to surface what’s driving team health issues and performance gaps across the org — then bring the VP of People and senior leaders a point of view, not just a summary.
• Be the steady hand when things get hard. Serve as the escalation point for complex, sensitive situations your People Partners bring to you. Navigate them with sound judgment and high integrity, and know when to bring in the VP of People.
• Pull the whole People team forward. Partner closely with the People Leadership Team to deliver integrated people solutions — from hiring strategy and onboarding to compensation decisions and leadership development.
  
  

What You’ll Bring

We’re looking for a track record of outcomes — not a specific title history or certification. This role is for the people leader who has done the real work: built and developed a team, owned complex org challenges, influenced senior leaders, and made the organizations around them measurably better. Here’s what that looks like:

Team leadership & player-coach identity

• You’ve managed and developed a team of HRBPs or People Partners — and you can point to specific people you’ve elevated, not just managed.
• You’re energized by doing the work yourself, not just overseeing it. You don’t hand off the hard stuff — you model how to handle it.
• You set a high bar for your team and hold it — on quality of partnerships, consistency of judgment, and the impact of the work.

High-growth environment experience

• You have 8–12+ years in people partnership or a closely related function, with at least 3–4 years at the director or senior HRBP level in a high-growth SaaS or technology company.
• You’ve worked somewhere that was scaling fast and you had to build processes and infrastructure to support it.
• You’ve supported revenue-generating or customer-facing teams and understand how quota-carrying managers think — and what it takes to earn their trust.
• You've partnered with R&D orgs and understand how they build teams, set technical hiring bars, and define success, and you earn their trust by speaking their language, not just supporting their processes.
  
  

Business judgment & executive presence

• You build credibility with senior leaders quickly — not by being agreeable, but by being sharp, direct, and useful.
• You don’t wait to be told where the gaps are. You identify organizational risk early, bring clarity to ambiguity, and know when to push back and when to align.
• You can deliver hard feedback to a VP, coach a struggling first-time manager, and present to the leadership team — in the same day — and calibrate your approach for each.
  
  

Operational & technology fluency

• You’re comfortable with HRIS platforms (Rippling a plus), people analytics, and performance management tools (Lattice or similar). You can pull the data and tell the story.
• You actively use AI tools to improve your own work — decision-making, synthesis, workflows — and bring that orientation to your team.
  
  

What We’re Not Looking For

• Someone who needs a lot of infrastructure to operate. We move fast and the expectation is that you move with us — making smart calls with imperfect information.
• A manager who leads from a distance. This role requires you to stay close to the work, model great partnership yourself, and develop your team through proximity — not delegation.
• Someone whose primary identity is HR compliance or generalist operations. We have specialists for that. This role is for someone whose craft is leadership development and organizational effectiveness.