People Ops Lead

Job description

Ricursive Intelligence is a frontier AI lab building self-improving systems, starting with chip design. We are reinventing chip development and closing the loop between AI and the hardware that fuels it, recursively accelerating the path to artificial superintelligence. Backed by $335M from Sequoia, Lightspeed, DST, and NVIDIA Ventures, we are a small and fast-paced team where every hire shapes the work. The company has unmatched talent density, including IMO, IPHO, and IOAA gold medalists, pioneers who made prior breakthroughs in chip design: AlphaChip (Nature 2021), ePlace (DAC Best Paper Nominee 2014), RL-CCD (DAC Best Paper 2023), INSTA (DAC Best Paper 2025), and C3PO (ASP-DAC Best Paper 2026), chip leads for Apple (iPhone, iPad, M1) and Google (TPU, OpenTitan), and top researchers and engineers from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Stanford, and MIT. We're looking for our first People Ops hire to build and manage the foundation of our employee experience. In this role, you will own the people operations function in its entirety, ensuring our team is supported, our systems run seamlessly, and our culture thrives as we scale. You will work closely with our Founding Recruiter on all things people. You should love building new processes from scratch and believe in a high-trust, engaging, and fun workplace. We're looking for candidates with prior experience in people ops roles at Series A or B start-ups. Key responsibilities: - *Onboarding & Offboarding:* Design, orchestrate, and execute a seamless onboarding process that sets new hires up for success as well as clear, professional offboarding protocols. - *People Systems & Compliance:* Maintain and operate our HRIS, partnering closely with our CFO, DevOps Lead, and Founding Recruiter on cross-functional matters. Draft and build systems not yet in place, including an employee handbook. - *Performance & Career Development:* Partner with leadership to define and implement simple, high-impact feedback loops, regular performance reviews, and career growth frameworks. - *Workplace Benefits: Pitch and establish a competitive workplace benefits plan that supports our team and keeps us competitive as an employer.* - *Culture & Employee Experience:* Lead internal communications for all people initiatives, direct our annual team retreat, and curate programs that drive employee engagement, retention, and growth.