Senior People Business Partner, Operations

Overview

As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We’re one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

 

Role

As a Senior People Business Partner, you’ll be the strategic force behind our global Operations organization: Customer Experience, Trust & Risk, and Fraud. The client group is several hundred employees worldwide, the large majority of them hourly, frontline agents and specialists, supported by leaders who run some of Whatnot’s largest and most operationally complex functions.

Reporting into our Director of People Business Partners, you’ll be a trusted advisor to senior leaders and ultimately shape the people strategy, org design, and talent decisions that let this org perform at its best. This is the org that keeps buyers and sellers trusting Whatnot every time they open the app, so the programs you build have to be built to last and built for scale. It’s a crucial role with a ton of room for impact.

 

You will:

• Coach leaders and managers, from VP to frontline team lead, to build stronger teams, sharper performance, and a better employee experience
• Partner on people strategy, including org design, workforce planning, and team development, for a large, distributed, majority-hourly workforce
• Advise on employee relations matters, including performance, behavior, and investigations, including issues specific to hourly and shift-based populations, partnering with legal as needed
• Drive core people processes (compensation, performance cycles, talent planning) at a scale built to work for both agents and senior leaders
• Partner with COEs (People Programs, Total Rewards, People Ops) to build strong programs built for a fast growing Operations population
• Use data and insights to get ahead of talent risks (e.g., attrition, engagement) across your client group, including trends specific to agent-level roles
• Lead change management across reorgs, role changes, and evolving business priorities for teams that operate globally and around the clock
• Support manager development, especially for first-line managers overseeing large frontline teams, on team effectiveness and leadership capability
• Leverage culture surveys and people data to shape decisions on culture, growth, retention, and performance across an ever-evolving workforce

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within 50 miles of our San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Phoenix hubs.

 

You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As our next Senior People Business Partner, you bring 7+ years as an HR Business Partner, including at least 4+ years supporting large-scale Operations populations in a remote or distributed fast-paced tech environment. You’ve supported client groups that range from VP to agent, and you move just as confidently between a senior leader’s org design conversation and a policy question touching hundreds of hourly employees at once. You also have:

• Deep familiarity with the employee lifecycle for hourly CX, Trust & Risk, and customer support populations, including hiring and onboarding at scale, shift-based scheduling dynamics, performance management, and attrition
• A strong partnership mindset. You build trust quickly with leaders, managers, and employees at every level, from VP down to agent
• Experience in fast-paced, high-growth environments. You’re proactive, action-oriented, and comfortable iterating at scale
• Sound judgment and discretion when handling sensitive situations, with strong attention to detail
• Clear, effective communication built for a remote-first, globally distributed environment
• Strong prioritization skills and a consistent line of sight to business goals
• Comfort working with data to surface insights and inform decisions across a large population

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
  • Monthly allowance for wellness
  • Annual allowance towards Childcare
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We’re passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

Please note: Whatnot will only contact you through official @whatnot.com email addresses. If you see an email impersonating a Whatnot recruiter, please disregard and report it as spam.

 

EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.