People Operations Lead

The multi-trillion dollar insurance industry still relies on phone calls, paper forms, and outdated systems that are slow, error-prone, and easy to fake. That's where Axle comes in. We bridge the gap between insurance and other industries through an AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, enabling our clients to make business decisions in seconds instead of hours while allowing consumers to unlock their most underutilized financial asset - insurance.

Why you should consider joining Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and top brands like Avis, Rocket Mortgage, and Experian - with more joining every month. Revenue growing 35% QoQ to mid-7-figures ARR, with best-in-class retention and growth continuing to accelerate. Join a tight-knit team where everyone drives real impact - top-tier customer and revenue metrics with half the team size of typical startups.

Work on genuinely hard, unsolved problems at the intersection of agentic AI, complex data structuring, and financial risk. Competitive compensation and equity, full benefits, unlimited time-off, and an annual team offsite.

As Axle's first People Operations hire, you'll build the people function end to end and be the connective tissue between our hiring ambitions and the team experience that makes people want to stay and do the best work of their careers. This is a full-stack recruiting mandate: you'll lead hiring across the entire company - both our technical org (Engineering and Product) and our go-to-market org (Sales, Partnerships, and Deployment) - so fluency operating across two very different talent markets is essential.

This is a builder's role, and it will ebb and flow. In one stretch you might be running six open reqs at once; in another you'll be designing a performance review cycle from scratch. As a north star, expect roughly 50-75% talent (own every open req, source and manage external recruiters, run a great candidate experience, and drive the offer process end to end) and 25-50% people operations (onboarding, culture, L&D, performance management, and compensation bands).

The mix will shift with the season; the bar won't - every new hire should feel set up to win from day one.

• Own all open requisitions across both technical hiring (Engineering, Product) and go-to-market hiring (Sales, Partnerships, Deployment), plus Corporate roles - managing pipeline, calibration, and velocity across each.
• Source, select, and manage our external recruiting partners (retained, embedded, and sourcing-only) and hold them accountable to results.
• Administer and optimize (bringing AI) our ATS (Ashby) - from workflow automation to funnel reporting.
• Design and run a candidate experience that  wows  - fast, personal, and consistent.
• Drive the offer process end to end, from leveling and comp to close.
• Standardize interview panels and train interviewers to keep our hiring bar calibrated as we scale.
• Build Axle's employer brand and top-of-funnel talent pipeline through recruiting and talent-building events - hosted meetups, hackathons, happy hours, and community nights - with a particular focus on New York, where we're scaling fastest and building a young, in-office team out of our Chelsea office (152 W 25th St).

• Build and own onboarding so every new hire ramps quickly and integrates with their team.
• Develop our employee handbook, first HR policies, and the internal resources that scale a growing team across New York and Atlanta.
• Partner with leadership on compensation bands and benchmarking (Carta/Pave), equity refreshes, and performance/feedback cycles.
• Own the systems of the function - HRIS (Rippling), ATS (Ashby), and the workflows that connect them.
• Shape our culture deliberately - rituals, all-company onsites, recognition, in-office events (especially in New York), and the small surprises that make Axle a place people love working.
• Partner with the founding team on org design and headcount planning.

• Building out AI agents / skills to help bridge communication gaps between different teams
• Developing