People and Culture Lead [80%]

About Optiml
Optiml is transforming real estate with Real Estate Decision Intelligence (REDI), an AI-powered decision technology that helps decarbonize buildings while optimizing asset and portfolio financial performance.

Our platform helps investors, owners, and asset managers make clearer capital allocation and decarbonisation decisions by translating complex regulatory, financial, and technical constraints into actionable renovation and investment plans.

Founded as an ETH Zurich spin-off, Optiml launched its first product in April 2024 and is now scaling across Europe and the US, with teams based in Zurich, London, and across Germany/the EU. The company is backed by leading US and European investors, including Innovation Endeavors (the fund of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), Planet A Ventures, KOMPAS, BitStone Capital, and The Bau Ventures. Following an oversubscribed €8M Seed round, we are accelerating product development and go-to-market execution.

About the role
This isn't a traditional HR hire: we're looking for someone who treats People Ops like a product, building automated systems rather than running the same process manually every time. You'll own the employee experience across CH/DE/UK/remote, working with our AI-native stack (Notion, Slack, AI agents/workflows) to let a lean team operate like a much bigger one.

Optiml runs hub-and-spoke, Zurich and London as physical hubs, with the team distributed across CH/DE/UK/EU. Culture doesn't happen by default here; it has to be designed. You'll own how onboarding runs, how offsites are structured, and how a distributed team stays connected, treating offsites as key culture-building moments.

We want a team that performs at a high level and genuinely enjoys working together. You'll be the one building and protecting that combination as we scale. You'll thrive here if you love building from first principles, are comfortable with ambiguity, and see culture as a system to design.

Your Mission

• Build and scale people systems suitable for a fast-growing B2B SaaS company — attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent aligned with our mission
• Create clarity, fairness, and accountability through effective people systems and rituals, automated wherever possible
• Maintain and evolve a culture of ownership, trust, and high performance as the company scales across three+ countries

Tasks

• Design and build automated onboarding, offboarding, and performance-review workflows
• Own the people tech stack: evaluate and implement tools/automations (AI-assisted scheduling, document generation, Notion-based systems) that reduce manual admin
• Run performance management processes (30/60/90s, probation reviews) and continuously automate the repeatable parts
• Act as the day-to-day point of contact for employees on culture, wellbeing, and people questions
• Own recruiting and hiring end-to-end: sourcing, screening, interview coordination, and managing candidate pipelines across commercial, technical, and operational roles
• Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements, build interview kits, and drive hiring decisions to close (templates, automated comms, structured interview kits)
• Design and own culture rituals and communication systems that work across a distributed, hub-and-spoke team
• Plan and help run team offsites and culture initiatives (starting with the September offsite)
• Partner with the Head of Operations on HR administration and compliance across entities
• Own end-to-end HR administration across CH/DE/UK entities — contracts, amendments, employee records, and compliance with local employment law
• Manage day-to-day employee relations: performance concerns, grievances, and sensitive people situations, escalating appropriately
• Support compensation and benefits administration; salary reviews, benchmarking, and benefits setup/renewal across entities
• Maintain and keep evolving internal people documentation as a living system

Requirements

• 5–8+ years in People Ops/HR/Culture, including time in a scaling startup — or a strong track record in an adjacent field (ops, consulting, founder's office) with a genuine pull toward people and culture work
• Proven track record owning full-cycle recruiting — sourcing, screening, and closing — not just coordinating interviews
• Comfortable operating across multiple countries/employment frameworks (CH/DE/UK exposure a plus)
• Strong written and verbal English; German a nice-to-have
• Genuinely AI-native, uses AI tools daily in your own workflow, not just aware of them
• Builder mentality over administrator mentality, energized by "how do we never do this manually again"
• Based in or able to work from London; willing to travel to Zurich at times plus offsites

🌍 Direct impact: Play a critical role in scaling a company transforming how real estate decarbonizes

⚙️ Ownership: Build and own the people function's tooling and systems from scratch — not inherit someone else's stack

🚀 Growth: Work closely with leadership and gain exposure across all company functions

💡 Culture: Join a mission-driven, high-performance, distributed team you'll help shape

🏆 Learning & development budget