People Operations Manager

About the role

You will run and continuously improve lemon.markets' People Operations backbone, so the employee lifecycle is smooth, reliable, and scalable as we grow. You ensure onboarding, changes, and offboarding are executed end-to-end with high quality, clear communication, and audit-ready documentation in a regulated environment.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end People Operations across onboarding, changes, and offboarding, plus the monthly payroll process, partnering with the People Business Partner, Finance, and external tax advisor to ensure smooth execution and accurate payroll inputs.
• Operate the People request flow via structured intake and work with leaders and employees to prioritise and resolve cases with clear updates to strengthen employee support and improve the overall employee experience.
• Build and continuously improve the Personio setup including workflows, templates, permissions, data quality checks, and reporting to ensure decisions are based on reliable People data.
• Ensure compliance-by-design in People Operations, aligning with Compliance, Legal, and Finance to keep documentation GDPR-first, access secure, and an audit trail in place.
• Standardise and document People Operations processes in Confluence to reduce dependency on tribal knowledge and increase consistency.
• Improve and automate recurring People Operations work through project-based initiatives to remove bottlenecks and error-prone steps.

What you'll need

• 2–5 years of People Operations experience in a fast-moving startup or scale-up, having owned employee lifecycle processes hands-on.
• Fluent in German (C1) and comfortable working in English.
• Hands-on experience working with German labour law in a People Operations context.
• Confident administering a People system, ideally Personio, and able to improve workflows, templates, permissions, data quality, and reporting using automation and AI.
• Strong attention to detail and confidentiality, keeping People data, access rights, and documentation clean and traceable in a regulated environment.
• High ownership with sound judgement, moving work forward while knowing when to pause, clarify, or escalate in sensitive cases.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, naturally creating clarity through documentation, checklists, and transparent status updates.
• Comfortable balancing steady operational volume with project work while keeping quality high.

What they offer

• Competitive salary based on your experience and value-add to lemon.markets.
• Flexible working hours with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration.
• Hybrid work setup from anywhere in Germany, with 4+ days per month on-site in Berlin office.
• Regular mentorship, stretch opportunities, clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations, and annual learning budget.
• Deutschlandticket sponsorship for employees on unlimited contracts and 50% off Beatvest financial education and investing platform.
• Workation: work remotely from anywhere in the EU for up to 10 consecutive days at a time and up to 60 days per year.