Founders Pledge
People Director
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About Us
At Founders Pledge, our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to do immense good with their charitable giving. Since launching in 2015, our community of over 2,200 members has pledged nearly $13.6B and donated $1.8B+ to the charitable sector in 45+ countries.
We provide end-to-end giving infrastructure, pioneering research, and access to a global network of experts. In other words, we help tech leaders become strategic philanthropists. Our members include founders and leaders behind companies such as Airbnb, UiPath, Dropbox, Skype, Spotify, and Uber.
We focus on deploying capital where it can achieve the greatest impact, guided by evidence, careful analysis, and long-term thinking.
Salary £90,000 - £95,000
About the Role
We’re currently looking for a People Director - an experienced senior People generalist to own our people strategy end-to-end and play a central role in shaping the culture, performance, and growth of an organization doing some of the most ambitious work in philanthropy.
This is genuinely a two-in-one role. On the strategic side, you'll be a key advisor to our CEO and senior leadership team: helping shape org design, building our people strategy, and thinking carefully about how we grow and sustain a high-performing global team. On the operational side, you'll be in the weeds on a day-to-day basis - overseeing payroll, resolving employee relations cases, keeping compliance tight across three jurisdictions, and making sure our People function runs smoothly. Neither side of this role is an afterthought. We need someone who is genuinely energized by both, and who can move between them with ease.
You'll lead a distributed team of four across the UK and US. If you're looking for a role where you can make a real mark on how we work, grow, and empower our teams, we'd love to hear from you.
What You'll Do
You'll set the direction and be accountable for the full people agenda at Founders Pledge. This spans everything from shaping our long-term people strategy to making sure our day-to-day operations run smoothly, across hiring, performance, compliance, culture, and beyond.
This includes:
- Strategic HR leadership: Act as a trusted advisor, coach and sounding board to the CEO and senior leadership team on all matters relating to people and culture.
- Organizational change: Lead change initiatives as the organization scales, ensuring teams are structured for agility and impact.
- Manager enablement: Coach and support managers to identify, manage and resolve performance issues. Oversee organisational learning and development to build a working environment where people are empowered to perform at their best and support professional growth across the organisation, including our annual all-staff global offsite.
- Talent acquisition and onboarding: Oversee end-to-end hiring and onboarding, ensuring a high-quality candidate and new-joiner experience that reflects our values.
- Total rewards: Design and oversee competitive, equitable global compensation and benefits frameworks that attract and retain top-tier mission-driven talent.
- Employee relations and compliance: Serve as the key point of contact for all employee relations matters, ensuring Founders Pledge meets its legal, moral, and pastoral obligations as a UK, US, and German employer.
- People team leadership: Lead, develop, and inspire a distributed team of four, creating a high-functioning, collaborative people function.
- Operational excellence: Maintain the Headcount Model and People Budget, collaborating with our CFO, provide performance data to the CEO, lead strategic workforce planning, and drive process improvements and efficiencies - including through smart use of technology and AI.
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What We're Looking For
You're a seasoned people leader who has thrived in fast-moving, scaling organizations — the kind of environment where you build things rather than just maintain them. You bring gravitas and warmth in equal measure: equally comfortable in a C-suite strategy session as you are untangling a compliance issue or updating a HR policy. You're data-informed, emotionally intelligent, and deeply motivated by the opportunity to shape culture and performance at an organization doing genuinely meaningful work.
You'll have:
- Significant senior generalist HR/People experience: An extensive track record in progressive People Director or Head of People roles, ideally at scaling SMEs, start-ups, or international non-profits, with direct experience managing People teams across multiple geographies.
- UK and US employment expertise: Deep, practical knowledge of employment law, payroll, and compliance across the UK and US (German experience a plus).
- Strategic and operational range: A proven ability to move fluidly between high-level organisational strategy and hands-on operational delivery - and genuine enthusiasm for doing both.
- Executive influence: Demonstrated experience coaching, influencing, and partnering with CEOs and C-suite leaders.
- People analytics: Comfort with people data and analytics, using insight to drive decisions and measure the effectiveness of HR initiatives.
- Change management: Experience leading organisational change in complex, distributed environments.
- Exceptional interpersonal skills: Outstanding emotional intelligence with the ability to build trust across all levels of the organisation and navigate sensitive employee issues with care and consistency.
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Location and Travel Requirements
You’ll need to be within commutable distance of London, to sit in our office 1-2 days per week (or more if you wish!). Our team is globally distributed across the UK and US, so comfort working across time zones is important.
There is some travel associated with this position.
We bring the global team together in the UK once per year for a global offsite. This is a week of collaborative learning, ideas generation and socialising.
In addition to this, each team has the opportunity to meet together at least once per year.
You’ll also be expected to travel to see teams in the US at least once per year.
Application Deadline
Applications will be accepted until EOD 18th July 2026.
Why Work With Us?
You can find more about the benefits we offer here, but what makes us truly special is our mission and people. We’re a diverse team from charitable and commercial backgrounds who believe amazing things can happen when we tackle problems together.
We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Founders Pledge. We seek people with different strengths, experiences, and backgrounds, who share our drive to understand and solve complex social challenges.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems requires different perspectives and unique ways of thinking, and we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone can do their best work.
If you’re excited about our mission but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply.
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