Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive, commensurate with experience

About the Role
Ready to put your people expertise behind the managers and high-performance culture of a mission-driven health tech company? We're looking for an experienced Senior People Operations Specialist who thrives in a fast-paced environment and is passionate about driving high-performance cultures. This is a hands-on specialist role, not a management one. You'll sit at the heartbeat of our mission-driven healthcare startup, working closely with our managers to enable our team to be at their best in conquering obesity and type 2 diabetes.
At Second Nature, we're trying to solve an incredibly complex problem, and that takes a team performing at its best. We believe high-performance cultures don't happen by accident: they're built by people who care deeply about fairness, honest feedback, and creating an environment where everyone can do their best work. That's where you come in.

What you'll do
- Help our managers drive a high-performance culture with empathy and compassion
- Train and coach managers in people best practice, helping them get the best from their teams (an L&D background is a plus)
- Advise managers on people situations, helping them act early, fairly, and with confidence
- Lead on culture at Second Nature, from quarterly events to away days
- Keep our people policies accurate, practical, and legally sound as UK employment law changes
- Support our twice-yearly performance review and calibration cycles, keeping them fair and consistent
- Keep our people practices compliant and audit-ready
- Contribute to wider People team projects, from business continuity and hiring to compliance and engagement

Experience
- Proven experience as a trusted people partner, advising managers on performance and people matters with fairness and sound judgement
- Strong working knowledge of UK employment law, including the ERA 2025 changes
- Experience running performance processes such as review cycles, calibration, and progression frameworks, using people data to keep decisions fair and consistent
- Experience supporting reward and pay processes, including pay reviews and benchmarking
- Experience designing and delivering manager training that builds real-world leadership skills and confidence
- Ability to see the whole employee lifecycle as one connected system and to spot where it feels clunky
- Ability to handle sensitive information with absolute discretion and empathy
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills

About you
- Calm and fair under pressure, trusted with the hardest conversations
- Warm and empathetic, but direct; you say the thing that needs saying, kindly, rather than letting a problem drift because it's awkward
- Organised and thorough, with a keen eye for detail; you know that in people work, the detail is often the difference between a fair process and an unfair one
- A team player who's happy to muck in beyond your specialism; no task is beneath you when the team needs a hand
- Handles sensitive information and conversations maturely; people tell you things knowing they'll go no further
- Professional and personable in equal measure; people trust you quickly, whether that's a manager mid-crisis or a colleague who just needs a listening ear

Qualifications
CIPD Level 5 or above, or equivalent experience