Head Of People

About Us
We are a boutique AI firm, founded in ****, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with an AI Lab in Milan, Italy.
Not a consultancy.
Not a software house.
An AI firm, boutique by design, with one focus: financial services.
We co-create AI agents with our clients and run them in production, inside regulated financial institutions.
Today more than 50 of our AI agents are live, and our team has filed 42 AI patents.
We believe in responsible, pragmatic AI: systems that are governed by design, integrate into real workflows, provide measurable value, and remain under the client's control.
Our Team
Forward-Deployed Engineers: 24 people, including 4 Ph.D.
s
Leadership: 3 people
We are a lean, technical-first team, and we're growing.
We plan to add 10 new Team Members in the next 6 months.
Growth at that pace only works if hiring, onboarding, payroll and the day-to-day running of the company work flawlessly.
That is this role.
The Role
The Head of People & Operations owns everything that makes Gemmo work as a company, as opposed to what we deliver to clients.
You report directly to the CEO and own each process end to end: from designing it, to running it, to fixing it when something breaks.
There's no handoff chain.
In practice, the role combines three disciplines:
People:
hiring, onboarding, leave, performance reviews, and the rituals that keep a growing team aligned.
Payroll & Administration:
monthly payroll, payslips, salary payments, benefits and purchasing, working with our payroll consultant, accountant and labour-law advisors.
Operations:
hardware, the Milan office, some support to Accountancy team (light), travel and offsites.
Nobody arrives strong in all three.
We hire people who are solid in people operations and Italian employment admin, and eager to grow into the rest.
We're a small company, and we value flexibility.
When a task comes up in another area, such as accounting, you'll be expected to get up to speed quickly and help out.
Who You Are
You have at least 2+ years of experience in HR, people operations or an HR generalist role, ideally in a startup or scale-up
You know Italian employment administration well: CCNL contracts, payroll, payslips, leave, internships and convenzioni di stage
You have run hiring end to end, including technical and graduate recruiting
You take ownership of outcomes, not just tasks: payroll and onboarding deadlines don't slip on your watch
You're comfortable managing external partners such as payroll consultants, accountants and labour lawyers
You build processes, document them and improve them, rather than reinventing them every month
You write clearly and communicate confidently in Italian and English, both written and spoken: our HQ is in Dublin and we work in English with international colleagues
What You'll Do
You'll own every process that keeps Gemmo running, from a candidate's first application to their payslip, their laptop and their next performance review.
Hiring
Create, publish and manage job announcements in Workable, from spec to offer
Run our internship pipelines with ITS and TTS institutes, and publish openings on university career boards
Finalise convenzioni di stage with universities and institutes
Onboarding and people management
Onboard every new hire so their contract, laptop, email, accounts and licences are ready on day one
Run the performance review cycle, end to end
Deliver our "Get the basics right" course to new joiners
Support our Agile rituals (daily standups, weekly sprints, Friday retrospectives) so they run on time and stay useful
New onboarding experience
Redesign onboarding end to end, from the signed offer to the end of the first three months
Build a first-weeks plan for each role, with a buddy, clear goals and check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days
Collect feedback from every new joiner and use it to improve the next onboarding
Learning programme for the technical team
Design a yearly learning programme for our Forward-Deployed Engineers, built around the skills our projects need
Select courses and certifications, and manage the training budget and enrolments
Organise internal knowledge-sharing sessions, and track participation and progress
Leave
Manage holiday and permessi requests
Monitor and finalise the company holiday plan, so delivery and leave never collide
Payroll and benefits
Run the monthly payroll for our Italian entity with our external payroll consultant
Check and distribute payslips, and prepare salary payments
Purchase and distribute meal vouchers (Edenred)
Purchasing, hardware and facilities
Handle purchases with company cards for the Milan office, with every receipt reconciled
Buy hardware and manage our laptop fleet through our device-management platform