People Director - Fixed term contract

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end people strategy for Butternut Box’s global foundational teams—Finance, Tech, Customer Love, and Brand & Creative—while acting as the trusted People partner to our UK Commercial Directors. You will translate ambitious business goals into a coherent, data-driven people agenda that scales across time zones, cultures, and rapidly evolving priorities.
• • Design and deliver high-impact talent initiatives that directly influence revenue, customer experience, and product innovation. From workforce planning and succession mapping to performance architecture and leadership development, you will ensure every foundational team has the capability and capacity to deliver on aggressive OKRs.
• • Build and iterate on a remote-first employee experience that feels unmistakably “Butternut.” You will craft rituals, communication cadences, and engagement programs that keep our global teams connected to our mission of delivering health and happiness to dogs and their humans.
• • Partner with Tech leadership to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion into every stage of the engineering and product life-cycle. You will audit hiring rubrics, promotion criteria, and learning pathways to ensure we attract and retain world-class talent from under-represented groups.
• • Serve as the executive coach and sounding board for Directors and senior managers across Finance, Customer Love, and Brand & Creative. Through 1:1s, team effectiveness workshops, and real-time feedback loops, you will elevate leadership capability and psychological safety at every level.
• • Lead organisational design sprints that reimagine how cross-functional squads form, storm, and perform. You will map skills matrices, identify capability gaps, and pilot new team structures that accelerate speed-to-market without burning people out.
• • Own the global compensation and benefits philosophy, benchmarking against high-growth tech and e-commerce peers to ensure we remain competitive in a tight talent market. You will model cost scenarios, present to the Exec team, and oversee rollout across four currencies and multiple regulatory environments.
• • Design and deploy a performance and reward framework that balances ambitious stretch goals with holistic wellbeing. You will calibrate rating distributions, bonus pools, and equity refresh cycles to reinforce our values of accountability, curiosity, and kindness.
• • Act as the escalation point for complex employee relations issues spanning UK employment law, US state regulations, and emerging EU directives. You will partner with external counsel to mitigate risk while preserving our culture of transparency and fairness.
• • Champion data-driven decision making by building a People Analytics dashboard that surfaces real-time insights on attrition risk, engagement drivers, and DEI progress. You will translate metrics into compelling narratives for the Board and investors.
• • Lead the bi-annual engagement survey cycle—from survey design and communication to action planning and progress tracking—ensuring every team has a clear roadmap to improve engagement scores by at least 10 points year-over-year.
• • Pilot and scale a global learning academy that democratizes access to leadership, technical, and functional skills. You will curate content, negotiate vendor partnerships, and measure ROI on learning spend against productivity gains and promotion velocity.
• • Collaborate with Finance to build a zero-based people cost model that aligns headcount growth with gross margin targets. You will scenario-plan for Series D fundraising, international expansion, and potential M&A activity.
• • Serve as the culture carrier for Butternut Box’s values—Be Bold, Be Human, Be Better—embedding them into onboarding, recognition, and performance conversations so that every employee can articulate how their work improves the lives of dogs and their families.
• • Manage and mentor a distributed People Business Partner and People Ops Manager, modelling inclusive leadership and creating clear pathways for their own career progression within the organisation.