Head of People Operations

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

Since launching several years ago, our team has grown rapidly. We find ourselves in an exciting position to further deepen our partnerships within the government contracting space, to continue to attract and retain amazing teammates, and to scale our capacity to make an even bigger difference in the world.

Currently, our company is organized into three main groups:
Executive Office (sets and operationalizes the strategic direction of the company), Federal Health & Civilian (focused on federal health and civilian missions), and Defense & Security (focused on defense, national security, and public safety missions).

As our Head of People Operations, you’ll be responsible for leading people operations across the company so we can continue to attract, empower, and retain amazing public interest technologists. Your work will be central to improving and scaling our ability to make a genuine difference in the world. Our Head of People Operations must have proven experience navigating the evolving legal, regulatory, and social landscapes while preserving organizational values and maintaining trusted relationships with employees, leaders, customers, and government stakeholders.

Talent acquisition

• Manage the talent life cycle, from workforce planning through onboarding, as part of the broader employee life cycle
• Provide leadership to the Head of Recruiting, who reports to this role, and grow the talent function over time
• Understand the current and future talent needs of the organization, and build and maintain a strategic talent pipeline
• Manage the onboarding process

HR

• Ensure awareness of and compliance with relevant labor laws, and lead employee relations, including sensitive and legal matters
• Perform benchmark research on compensation and benefits, and partner on HR functions such as payroll
• Manage and optimize our HRIS (Rippling)
• Create organizational charts and define each position’s responsibilities
• Manage the offboarding process

People & culture

• Own company-wide employee engagement: design and run engagement programs that reach across business units
• Manage our performance management system (e.g., individual performance planning, performance evaluation, internal promotions, continuous feedback)
• Support the development and ongoing improvement of a professional capability framework for describing and measuring how to progress and be successful in various roles at Skylight
• Discuss career-pathing options with high-potential employees and their team leaders
• Organize and oversee individual and team training programs (both internal and external)
• Design programs that build culture, drive engagement, and retain great people as we scale
• Create and implement succession plans

Across all three pillars

• Partner closely with business unit leaders and the executive team to align people strategy with the needs of the business
• Build fair, consistent people practices that reach a broad range of talent pools, reduce bias in how we evaluate candidates, and partner with organizations that widen our candidate reach
• Implement data-driven approaches to continually improving our people operations and talent outcomes
• Understand and drive the adoption of emerging best practices related to people operations

• Experience as a people operations leader or similar role
• Experience scaling people operations in a fast-growing organization
• Demonstrated experience building high-performing, mission-driven workplace cultures where employees feel respected, supported, and empowered to do their best work
• Sound judgment balancing transparency and visibility with confidentiality, privacy, and risk
• Experience recruiting design and technology professionals, such as product managers, product designers, user researchers, content strategists, software engineers, and Dev Ops engineers
• Experience working with remote teams
• Awareness of relevant labor laws and how to comply with them
• Ability to operate at strategic and tactical levels
• Excellent interpersonal, motivational, and relationship management skills
• Organized,…