People Operations Manager

People Operations Manager | Non-Profit AI Research Lab | San Francisco | $150,000 - $200,000 Base

Be the first person at Transluce whose whole job is people.

Transluce is a non-profit research lab building world-class tools to oversee AI and steer its development for the public good. We use AI to investigate AI at a scale manual testing cannot reach, and we build in public so anyone can use what we make. We're growing from 20 to 40+ employees over the next 12 months - and half the people who'll work here a year from now haven't been hired yet.

The opportunity

Hiring well, keeping the people we hire, and building a place worth staying are among the highest-leverage things we do - and right now, nobody owns that full-time. You'll be the first dedicated People/HR hire, reporting directly to the Chief of Staff. This is an individual-contributor role: you design the systems and run them. We have a solid operational foundation (HRIS, benefits, ATS), but a lot of what works for 20 people won't work for 40+, and your judgment shapes what gets built and in what order.

Strategy and execution aren't separable here. The systems you design are the ones you run day to day - from fixing a payroll error to deciding what we need to build next quarter. As we're a very small team, you may also flex into other operational domains, further expanding your skillset. We expect to keep expanding the operations team, and you'd he