Head of People

We are a boutique AI firm, founded in 2020, 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.

• 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 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.

• 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

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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Manage holiday and permessi requests
• Monitor and finalise the company holiday plan, so delivery and leave never collide

• Run the monthly payroll for our Italian entity with our external payroll consultant
• Check and distribute payslips, and prepare salary payments