People Partner

Job Overview

You'll be joining Black Forest Labs as a People Partner, working closely with the Head of People and the existing EU People team member. Your role will involve balancing People Partnering and People Operations, with a focus on partnering as the team grows.

Responsibilities

People Partnering

• Serve as a key People Partner for EU-based managers and employees, providing support across performance, team effectiveness, and organisational design.
• Coach and develop managers across the org, building leadership capability as we scale.
• Own compensation strategy inputs and lead key employee lifecycle moments, performance cycles, promotions, difficult conversations.
• Lead employee relations matters in the EU with sound judgement and solid knowledge of German employment law; know when to escalate to external counsel.
• Be a trusted presence at HQ, the person leaders come to before a situation becomes a problem.

People Operations

• Set the standard for people ops quality in Europe; not doing everything yourself, but ensuring it's done well.
• Provide guidance to our EU Ops and People Partner, supporting their development and ensuring execution quality.
• Use data, tooling and AI to make People Ops smooth and scalable, spot inefficiencies and fix them.
• Own your portion of the People roadmap, from design through to delivery.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in People, Operations, Consulting, Programme Management, or a related field; with meaningful HR exposure and a genuine interest in building the people function.
• Experience working in tech; deep tech (AI, infrastructure, developer tooling, fintech, or similar).
• Must have startup or scale-up experience, you know what it feels like to build, and seek out opportunities to build new processes or significantly improving existing processes.
• Comfortable moving between strategic thinking and hands-on execution.
• Strong coaching instincts with the credibility to influence senior stakeholders.
• Strong communication skills with fluency in German and English.

Nice to Have

• Formal HR qualification.
• Prior experience as founding or lead People hire in an early-stage or scaling environment.
• Working knowledge of German employment law.
• Exposure to cross-border or multi-entity employment in Europe.
• Coaching qualification or structured leadership development experience.

What We Offer

• Base Annual Salary: €100,000 - €130,000 + Equity.
• A distributed team with real offices that people actually use.
• Everything we do is grounded in four values: Obsessed, Low Ego, Bold, and Kind.