Senior People Excellence Manager / Head of People Excellence
Hi!
We were waiting for you! 👀
We know these are busy days for everyone and that you have plenty of options, so thank you for taking the time to read this posting! 😉
🤝 This is us, using AI to (truly) disrupt an entire industry
Started at Stanford by Stanford and Wharton/Google alums, FounderNest is an AI-native company that helps corporations around the world improve and streamline their market intelligence processes, including but not limited to:
- Helping them understand the taxonomy and dynamics of the spaces they are interested in.
- Mapping out all the players operating in those spaces.
- Getting unique insights in these areas (e.g. growth rate).
- Tracking what their competitors are doing in them.
Our core technology is built on real-time analytics and Generative AI running on private and public company data. We fuel our Natural Language Processing technology with +50M companies and +1.2B aggregated data points, allowing us to be 3x-5x better than alternatives.
We are proud to count amongst our customers some of the largest corporations worldwide.
This is the perfect time to join us!
👩🏼🎨 What you will do
Note: this is a fast-track position towards a Head of People Excellence position. Based on experience and performance in the recruitment process, candidates may directly join as Head of People Excellence.
If you are passionate about growing an organization, making sure it runs smoothly, and cultivate and develop its culture, this is your deam job!
- People strategy: you will help define the strategic priorities of people excellence at FounderNest, including: talent retention and attraction, leadership development, training, employer branding…
- People operations: you will own the definition and execution of the main people processes, including: hiring, onboarding, performance appraisal, compensation and benefits, culture, events, offboarding…
- Admin: you won’t be alone in this. We work with a law firm and a “gestoría” and they do the heavy-lifting (you'll just need to communicate with them).
🎯 What you will bring
- 3+ years of HR experience in startups identifying, hiring, and developing top talent.
- Autonomy and drive to run and develop the people excellence function.
- Passion for building a diverse and inclusive working environment.
- Natural leadership skills. People love working with you.
- Exposure to the definition of the strategic goals of a HR function or team.
- Experience with hybrid-remote work cultures.
- Solid knowledge in all areas of HR and employment law in Spain.
- Strong oral and written communication skills in English and Spanish.
Note that this is a hybrid-remote position based in Madrid, Spain.
🏆 Bonus Points
- Being a first or early HR hire at a company before.
- Relevant experience in high growth startups from Seed to Series A.
- Past leadership roles in key HR processes: hiring, onboarding, performance appraisal, culture…
🙏🏼 About you
- You want to join an ambitious, high-performing team that dreams about building something meaningful and impactful.
- You are very self-organized, have a great ability to prioritize and are able to make trade-offs. You also feel comfortable to work as a solo-person team, are autonomous in your work and enjoy making decisions on your own (obviously supported by Felix).
- You like uncertainty and the unknown (i.e. you love start-ups 🙂 ). If you don't know about something, you will find out how to do it. You require minimum guidance and you leverage your experience and network to determine what FounderNest needs to do on a People level.
- A certain level of admin work does not overwhelm you. You appreciate doing it as foundational work of the People function.
- You thrive in a culture of open, candid, and constructive feedback taking place in all directions.
- You leave your ego behind to make sure you accomplish what is best for your team and your company.
- You are looking for an exciting challenge, and compensation is only one of many factors to assess this opportunity (don’t worry, our compensation is competitive!).
- Your words and commitments are very important to you - you are reliable, punctual, and don't drop the ball.
- You embrace balance at work: you know when to go the extra mile, and when to slow down.
- You don't hesitate to take the initiative to solve the problems you identify without needing others to aks you to do so.
🏢 Our Values: CALIBER
- We pride ourselves on having built an open, humble, diverse, supportive, and truly unique culture that revolves around our seven values codified in the word CALIBER:
- 🎯 Customer Excellence: Our users have to experience excellence in all we do. Excellence attracts excellence. We hire people and technology smarter than us.
- 💨 Agility: Towards building adaptability to change and without compromising excellence. No analysis paralysis. A strong sense of urgency. We disagree and commit.
- 🙇🏼♂️ Learning: To constantly learn and give constructive feedback in any direction towards personal and professional growth.
- 🪄 Innovation: To lead through constant innovation that does not compromise simplicity. The impossible is possible.
- ⚖️ Balance: To not hesitate to go the extra mile when required and without waiting for someone to tell you. To also take time off any time you need it :)
- 😇 Ethics: To be frugal and radically truthful and transparent and to never behave unethically. Cannot afford to die of success or arrogance.
- 🫂 Respect: To suspend judgment and assume positive intent, to be compassionate, and to have no ego. Yes public and private 1) self-criticism (admit mistakes) and 2) gratitude and recognition.
- 🖐🏾 We are also proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate, neither positively nor negatively, in hiring or in any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
♥️ Our DNA: What drives success at FounderNest
- At FounderNest, we believe that the best teams are built on shared traits. Here’s what makes someone succeed at FounderNest:
- 🤝 Humility without Egos: To listen, learn, adapt, and grow together, prioritizing collective success over personal recognition. There is always something new to learn from others!
- 🧠 Intellectual Ambition: To see challenges as opportunities and thrive in a team of brilliant minds. Always curious and resourceful, with a 10X mindset and first-principles thinking approach, we innovate, adapt, and ask: "What’s next?
- 🚀Agency & Ownership: To be proactive, take initiative, embrace accountability, and lead and build with purpose in order to succeed in our high-performing environment.
- 💪 Hard-Working: To go the extra mile with focus and passion while ensuring balance is maintained, fostering sustainable long-term excellence.
- 👥 100% Team Player: To always make decisions with the team in mind, knowing that collaboration doesn’t just add impact—it multiplies it. Together we are stronger.
- ⚡Outcome-Driven Mindset: To focus on making things happen—zero fluff, just real impact. It’s about owning results, moving fast, and focusing on what truly drives change.
⌛️We are committed to you
🚀 Personal & professional growth
You will be a key part of a lean team that will support your growth, within a safe environment. You will be supported in experimenting with and learning about FounderNest’s People Excellence efforts.
You will have direct exposure to Silicon Valley, which includes some of the best investors and professionals in the world. We proudly count on many of them as our own investors and advisors.
Our target audience includes some of the coolest ICPs you can think of (e.g. Heads of Innovation, Heads of Ventures, Heads of Corporate Development).
Elevate your skills as we tackle our most impactful challenges: We've achieved more than teams 15x our size in less time — and there's so much more to do and learn.
Exponential growth: We humbly say that 6 months at FounderNest may be equivalent to 2 years at any other company in terms of your growth. This is thanks to the pace at which we operate, the state-of-the-art practices and processes that drive our company, and the unparalleled caliber of the people you will get to work with. You'll join at the perfect time to shape how we grow from here.
💰 Compensation & Perks
You will have a full-time contract (i.e. no freelance work).
We will offer you a very competitive salary based on your past experience and future potential, including a variable component baked into it. We also want you to have stock options since we want you to grow as the company grows and to celebrate FounderNest’s success at all levels.
Equipment 💻 : all you need to kill it at work. Just request it and we’ll do our best.
You will have a flexible schedule ⏳ since we want you to have the freedom to organize your time towards achieving our ambitious goals.
We have a mix of fully remote and hybrid employees 🌍, giving you the flexibility of remote work along with opportunities to collaborate in person at our offices in Madrid and California. Plus, we regularly organize activities, events, and off-sites to strengthen our team connections.
Unlimited vacation policy 🏄🏼♂️, as long as you coordinate with your team and you meet our goals.
90/10 policy: each team member can devote 10% of their time (usually a Friday every other week) to innovate and grow professionally 📚.
Birthday policy 🎂: We’ll celebrate your day, showing appreciation with a gift.
👫 Hiring process
- After you apply, we will review your submission and decide whether we invite you to a quick intro call with Félix, our CEO and Hiring Manager for this role.
- If there is a fit, we will then invite you to start a 3 step fast interview process that we promise will be exciting — you will get to meet some of the leaders at the company you will get to work with, and you will get a great flavor of what working at FounderNest looks like 🙂.

Culture
At FounderNest we have an agile work environment with a customer-centric obsession and a strong focus on making sure that every team member has a path to thrive at a professional and personal level. Our culture is strongly driven by Silicon Valley Standards, so excellence is expected in everything we do. However, we do not want to lose sight of having fun while we learn and celebrating our accomplishments.
We pride ourselves on having built an open, humble, diverse, supportive, and truly unique culture. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values (they are codified in our framework called CALIBER: Customer Excellence, Agility, Learning, Innovation, Balance, Ethics, Respect) and our passion for technology, you will find a home at FounderNest.
About FounderNest
FounderNest is a gen-AI company in stealth mode that helps corporations in the world improve and streamline their market intelligence processes, including: (1) helping them understand the taxonomy and dynamics of the space, (2) mapping out all the players, (3) getting unique insights about the space ; and (4) tracking what their competitors are doing.
Senior People Excellence Manager / Head of People Excellence
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