People Performance & Culture Manager (all genders)

Performance and development — your focus:

• You own our performance cycle: goal setting, feedback conversations, development reviews, documentation. You turn it into a rhythm, not an annual ordeal.
• You build a competency and career framework that makes the difference between one role and the next legible — for individual contributors and managers alike.
• You evolve our bonus and objectives system: individual target profiles instead of a watering can, measurable instead of felt.
• You enable managers to hold good conversations — including the uncomfortable ones. You train, you accompany, you hold up the mirror.
• You design onboarding and the first 90 days so that people want to stay.
• You measure engagement, attrition, and sentiment — and deliver not just the number but the interpretation and the proposal.
• You work on our culture during a phase of steep growth that follows a difficult restructuring. Both are true; both belong on the table.

The entire people function — your ownership:

• You own the full employee lifecycle: joining, changing, leaving — in substance and in process.
• You run recruiting end-to-end: clarifying need with hiring managers, postings, selection, offer, employer branding.
• You own preparatory payroll together with our tax advisor and finance team. 
• You manage employment contracts, amendments, references, and employment law topics — with external counsel where it is needed.
• You are the system owner for Personio and make sure our people data is accurate, complete, and GDPR-compliant.
• You lead and develop our working student in People Operations and delegate the administrative execution — the accountability stays with you.
• You advise the management team on people questions and get involved early, rather than administering decisions after the fact.

So there are no surprises: The title says performance and culture, because that is the focus we want to build. In practice you are our first people lead and you carry the entire function — including payroll preparation, contracts, and recruiting. If you only want organizational development, this is not your role. If you want to build a function from zero, it is exactly it.

• 4 - 6 years in people roles, a meaningful part of it generalist — HR business partnering, people operations, people development, or a standalone role in a small company.
• You've worked in dynamic, fast-growing companies — ideally a startup or scaleup. You know the pace at which team size, structures, and priorities shift every few months, and you build processes that scale with the company instead of slowing it down.
• You've introduced or fundamentally rebuilt a performance process and know exactly where those processes go to die.
• You master the operational side: preparatory payroll, contracts, master data, certificates. You don't consider that beneath you.
• German employment law is familiar territory — dismissal protection, formal warnings, settlement agreements, fixed-term contracts, working-student rules. 
• You've coached managers who didn't want to be coached, and made them better anyway.
• You can handle conflict. You tell managers and founders uncomfortable things without burning the relationship.
• You work with data and stay close to people. If you only do one of the two, this isn't the role.
• Fluent German, strong English — our team is international.

What we offer

• Work with real AI technology at international level — not as a pilot project, but as our business model.
• Genuine room to shape things. Your ideas do not land in a suggestion box; they land in the next iteration.
• A short path to the management team. Decisions take days, not committee rounds.
• Growth you are part of. We are building the company’s next chapter — with roles, responsibility and prospects that did not exist a year ago.
• Leipzig as your primary base, with regular time in the office and flexible remote work. Hybrid models are everyday practice here, not the exception.
• Permanent contract, full-time.
• Performance bonuses for demonstrable results.
• Multi-day team events in places that are actually fun.

Our hiring process

1. Intro interview — we get to know each other, and you learn where we stand and where we are heading.
2. Case study or technical study, depending on the role — a real problem from our day-to-day that we work through together.
3. Interview with your future manager and, depending on the position, with our founders.