Head of People Operations

Head of People Operations

Level: Medior to Senior • Location: Amsterdam • Working Hours: Part-time or Full-time • Reporting to: CEO

About UpScrolled

UpScrolled is an independent social media platform built on a simple idea: people should control what they see, say, and share online.

We exist because we were tired of social media that treats people like products. So we’re building the alternative: a platform where your data stays yours, your voice actually reaches your followers, and your feed belongs to you, not an algorithm.

We’re a small, fast-moving team with a big mission and a community of millions of UpScrollers who joined because they were done waiting for someone else to fix social media. We need people who care about that as much as we do. Come scroll differently with us.

About the Role

We’re hiring a people architect on the UpScrolled team. At a company of fewer than 30 people, the people function isn’t a department — it’s a single person who holds the structural integrity of how we hire, support, develop, and part ways with our team. That person is this role.

You’ll build the people infrastructure from the ground up: the policies, the hiring engine, the onboarding experience, the performance frameworks, and the employment compliance — all of it. You’ve done this kind of work in a startup before and you understand that good people ops isn’t about administering processes. It’s about building the structures that protect people and allow everyone else to move fast without breaking trust.

We hire globally through an Employer of Record, which means you’ll need to be fluent in EOR operations and comfortable navigating multi-jurisdictional compliance with pragmatism and care. As UpScrolled builds out a HQ in Amsterdam, you’ll use your experience in the Dutch labor market and employment regulations to support this growth.

What You’ll Do

• Own the full employee lifecycle end-to-end — from offer through offboarding — for a globally distributed team
• Manage all hiring: full-cycle recruiting across open roles, partnering with hiring managers to define needs, run structured processes, and close candidates
• Manage our global EOR relationships (Remote.com, or similar), ensuring compliant, consistent, and equitable onboarding for employees across multiple countries
• Design, write, and maintain the employee handbook, offer templates, employment contracts, and all core people policies
• Build and own our compensation structure — pay banding, salary zone management, and the frameworks that make compensation defensible and consistent
• Design and run performance review cycles, goal-setting frameworks, and promotion processes from the ground up
• Handle employee relations with rigor and care: difficult conversations, conflict resolution, manager coaching, and when necessary, investigations and exits
• Ensure employment law compliance across all jurisdictions where we hire, coordinating with legal counsel and EOR partners where needed
• Build and manage the people tech stack — HRIS, ATS, and the tools that make the function run without unnecessary overhead
• Partner with the management team on org design, headcount planning, and the culture we’re intentionally building
• Create onboarding experiences that set new team members up to contribute quickly and feel genuinely welcomed from day one
  

What Success Looks Like

• Every team member, regardless of where in the world they sit, has a clear, equitable, and dignified employment experience
• The people infrastructure is defensible, consistently applied, and actively used — not just documented
• Hiring moves at the pace the business needs, with quality, and without becoming a fire drill
• Managers have the frameworks and support they need to lead their teams well — and they use them
• When things get complicated — and they will — there is a policy we can point to and a person who knows how to apply it

What You Are

• An experienced people ops generalist who has built or significantly grown an HR function, ideally as the first or sole HR person at a startup
• Deeply comfortable with the full breadth of this role — recruiting, compliance, employee relations, culture, compensation — without treating any of it as beneath the job title
• Experienced managing global employment through EOR platforms and navigating multi-jurisdictional compliance across Europe and beyond
• Someone who writes policy the way it should be written: clearly, defensibly, and with the employee reading it in mind
• Comfortable working without a team and without a fully built playbook — you’re the one building it
• Someone who holds the tension between protecting the organization and protecting the people inside it — and who knows which one comes first

What You Are Not

• Someone who treats the people function as a compliance mechanism that exists to protect the organization from employees
• Someone who needs a team around them or a mature, built-out function to be effective
• Someone who defaults to legal cover over human judgment when the two are in tension
• Someone who writes a policy and then forgets it exists until something breaks

Location

UpScrolled maintains an office in Amsterdam, but this role can be fully remote. We prefer candidates who can work overlapping Central European time (CET/CEST), since that’s when most of the team collaborates.

Compensation

UpScrolled is headquartered in the Netherlands, but we hire in all European countries and many others around the globe.

We offer health insurance and paid time off (vacation, sick, parental, etc.) in compliance with local labor regulations in the employee’s country of residence.

Equal Opportunity

UpScrolled is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of the people our product serves. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, or any other protected characteristic. If you need accommodations at any stage of the hiring process, please reach out — we will work with you.

Work Authorization

Candidates must have the legal right to work in their stated location. UpScrolled does not currently offer visa sponsorship.