What we’re looking for:

• People-as-performance operator: Strong business acumen with a track record of treating the People function as a driver of company/organizational outcomes (talent density, speed, quality, and reliability)—not just a compliance, people support, or admin team.
• A builder in lean, distributed environments: Demonstrated success building simple, scalable systems (hiring, performance, rewards, workforce models, HRIS) across multiple countries and regulatory contexts—with high judgment on tradeoffs under tight constraints.
• Trusted pair of hands for complex employee relations: Depth in sensitive employee relations, risk management, and safeguarding across very diverse contexts and cultural settings; calm, discreet, and principled.
• Exceptional leader and manager: Recruits, calibrates, and develops senior talent; sets a high bar; builds a small, high-leverage team and operating cadence that scales. 
• First-principles, outcome oriented problem solver: Structured, analytical thinker who disaggregates problems, designs from first principles, iterates quickly, and measures results.
• Varied context experience: Comfort moving between private sector and NGO settings and between different org sizes; able to bring best-of-both to GD’s model. 

What you’ll do:

• Make talent a competitive advantage: Raise the hiring bar; build a repeatable “hiring machine” (calibration, principles/values assessment, structured loops, quality-at-30/90 days). Build a proactive network and bench for executive and scarce roles.
• Design performance + rewards: Implement a lightweight, high-signal performance system tied to development and consequences; refresh compensation and total rewards to attract and retain top talent in our markets while preserving our lean model and staying economically efficient as an organization. 
• Be the steady employee relations advisor: Lead on sensitive personnel matters with discretion and fairness; support investigations, safeguarding, crisis response, and change communications.
• Coach and level up leadership: Partner with the CEO/COO and executives on org design, succession, and leadership effectiveness; intervene early to raise or replace when needed.
• Build scalable global people ops: Improve HRIS/workforce tools; standardize core processes; ensure compliant, efficient operations across countries (subsidiaries, contractors, EOR/PEO) in close partnership with Finance and Legal.
• Strengthen culture and engagement: Ensure our values are felt and lived across the organization; that staff are supported to be at their best thanks to inclusive practices that build growth, trust, belonging, creativity, and execution speed.
• Own people analytics: Ship leadership dashboards (headcount, hiring velocity/quality, retention, eNPS/voice, performance distribution) to inform decisions and accountability.
• Operate with leverage: Keep the People team small, senior, and high-output; set SLAs, clarify ownership, and continuously remove friction for program and fundraising teams.