Head of People

The role

The Head of People will take ownership of the HR function to help scale the company. This role involves building HR foundations, managing the employee lifecycle, and overseeing hiring operations across multiple jurisdictions.

What you will do

• Develop and improve scalable HR foundations, processes, templates, and policies.
• Ensure HR compliance fundamentals are robust and audit-ready.
• Lead the evolution of compensation foundations including salary bands and benchmarking.
• Establish a people metrics cadence to support leadership decision-making.
• Own HR systems and data governance.
• Partner with managers as a trusted advisor through coaching.
• Implement and run a performance and development framework.
• Own the end-to-end employee experience from onboarding to offboarding.
• Shape and scale culture and ways of working across distributed teams.
• Own and improve the recruitment process and partner with Finance on headcount planning.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of progressive HR / People Operations experience, ideally in a scaling tech or R&D environment.
• Experience working with Irish employment legislation and HR compliance requirements.
• Demonstrated experience managing HR across multiple countries/jurisdictions.
• Strong comfort coordinating external legal, payroll and benefits providers.
• Strong working knowledge of employment contracts and HR compliance fundamentals.
• Experience partnering closely with Finance (budgets, headcount planning, approvals, compensation inputs).
• Excellent communication skills, sound judgement, and high discretion with confidential information.
• Highly organised, resourceful, and comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal supervision.

Nice to have

• Experience building HR processes from early stage to repeatable and scalable.
• Experience supporting recruiting operations and vendor management.
• Experience working across the Netherlands, Romania, the US, and Canada is a strong plus.

About the company

Equal1 is a fast-growing quantum computing company operating across Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, the US, and Canada.