People Operations Manager

About the role

Your mission is to 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. Partner 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. 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 (workflows, templates, permissions, data quality checks, reporting). Collaborate with the People Business Partner and key stakeholders so decisions are based on reliable People data.
• Ensure compliance-by-design in People Operations. Align with Compliance, Legal, and Finance to keep documentation GDPR-first, access secure, and an audit trail in place to lower risk in a regulated environment.
• Standardise and document People Operations processes in Confluence. Create clear process docs, checklists, and templates to reduce dependency on tribal knowledge and increase consistency.
• Improve and automate recurring People Operations work through project-based initiatives. Partner with subject-matter experts 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 with hands-on ownership of employee lifecycle processes.
• Fluent in German (C1) and comfortable working in English, collaborating in both languages day-to-day.
• Hands-on experience working with German labour law in a People Operations context, knowing when to involve the right internal or external stakeholders.
• Confident administering a People system (ideally Personio) and improving workflows, templates, permissions, data quality, and reporting.
• Work with close attention to detail and confidentiality, keeping People data, access rights, and documentation clean and traceable in a regulated environment.
• Strong service mindset, treating lemoneers and leaders as customers and designing processes that enable great work every day.
• Clear written and verbal communication, naturally creating clarity through documentation, checklists, and transparent status updates in a Slack-first setup.
• Comfortable balancing steady operational volume with project work while keeping quality high.

What they offer

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