Head of Talent and People

About the role

Sardine is looking for a Head of Talent & People to lead and grow our global team. This is a hands-on, player-coach role - you'll set direction and manage a full team of practitioners, while still staying close enough to the work to source a hard-to-fill candidate yourself, sit in on a tough employee relations conversation, or dig into a comp band directly. You'll own Talent, People Ops, and HR Business Partnering end-to-end, with a mandate to build pragmatic systems that scale with a fast-growing startup.

What you'll be doing

Team Leadership

- Lead and manage a team of Recruiters, People Ops/HR professionals, including any team leads within those functions

- Set goals, priorities, and capacity plans across Recruitment and People Ops/HR

- Coach, develop, and performance-manage team; build a bench of future team leads as the org grows

- Own headcount planning across the organization

- Create the operating rhythm for the team (standups, pipeline reviews, OKRs, hiring sprints) without over-processizing a still-scrappy function

- Model the player-coach standard you expect from the team - jump into the work alongside them

Talent Acquisition (the largest part of the job. This role is Talent-heavy)

- Build and continuously improve our hiring process: interview loops, scorecards, calibration, and candidate experience

- Partner directly with the CEO and Exec team on leadership hires. Own full-cycle recruiting for key leadership roles, including sourcing, screening, and closing candidates yourself

- Build scalable sourcing channels and employer branding so Sardine competes for top talent without over-relying on agencies

- Track and report on hiring metrics (pipeline health, time-to-fill, offer acceptance) and adjust strategy accordingly

People Operations

- Oversee the People Ops Lead and team who own the employee lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding, HRIS administration, benefits administration, and compliance) - ensure the function runs smoothly and scales with rest of the company

- Manage and scale our existing performance review, compensation banding, leveling, and promotion cycle infrastructure - this is already built and robust; your job is to run it well, refine it as we grow, and make sure it stays credible with employees and managers

- Ensure compliance with employment law across jurisdictions where Sardine has employees, in partnership with your People Ops team

- Provide oversight and escalation support on vendor relationships (benefits brokers, payroll providers) that the People Ops Lead manages day to day

HR Business Partnering

- Act as a trusted advisor to managers and the leadership team on org design, team structure, performance management, and employee relations

- Partner with leaders as an internal leadership coach

- Handle employee relations issues with sound judgment, discretion, and fairness

What you'll need

- 12+ years in talent/recruiting and people roles, with real depth in talent

- Experience running people function at fast-paced, high-growth tech startups

- Proven experience managing a strong Talent and People team, ideally spanning both Recruitment and People Ops/HR - you know how to set direction, hold people accountable, and develop managers

- Generalist range: you're equally credible talking about an offer negotiation, a comp band, a difficult employee relations issue, or a performance management

- A player-coach mindset - you want to do the work, not just direct it

- Excellent judgment and discretion; you build trust quickly with founders, execs, and employees at every level

- Strong operating instincts: you build lightweight, scalable systems rather than heavy process

- Based in the Bay Area, with the ability to work from our Berkeley office at least 2 days every week