People Operations Business Partner

Role Overview

What You'll Own

• Act as a trusted people partner to business leaders across functions, advising on organizational design, workforce planning, and team effectiveness.
• Design and operationalize performance management frameworks, review cycles, and calibration processes that hold up at scale.
• Build and maintain competency frameworks and leveling guides that define what good looks like at every stage of the career ladder.
• Coach managers on expectation-setting, feedback delivery, and performance management, developing their capability rather than solving problems for them.
• Own employee relations matters with discretion and consistency, applying working knowledge of UAE Labour Law and relevant regional regulations.
• Ensure HR policies are current, accessible, and applied consistently across all entities and employment types, including contractors.
• Maintain the integrity of people data and HR systems, building dashboards and reporting on headcount, attrition, performance, and engagement.
• Drive structured onboarding experiences that accelerate time-to-productivity, and own the offboarding process with equal rigor.
• Partner closely with the Talent Acquisition function on role scoping, leveling, and intake to ensure consistency between internal grading and external hiring.
• Run engagement initiatives and pulse surveys, synthesizing results into clear recommendations for leadership.

What We're Looking For

• 4-7 years in HR Business Partnering or People Operations within high-growth startups or scale-ups.
• Demonstrated track record of partnering with senior leaders across multiple functions and seniority levels.
• Hands-on experience building performance management systems and competency or leveling frameworks.
• Working knowledge of UAE & KSA Labor Laws.
• Experience managing across distributed teams and mixed employment types (employees and contractors).
• Strong proficiency with HRIS platforms, performance management platforms, and workflow tools; comfortable building process from scratch.
• Fluency in English; Arabic is a strong advantage.

Capabilities

• Business Acumen
• Understands how the business makes money and where people risk intersects with commercial performance.
• Speaks the language of the leaders they support.
• Trusted Advisor
• Builds credibility through consistency, discretion, and honest counsel.
• Leaders seek them out not because they have to, but because the advice is good.
• Systems Builder
• Does not accept ambiguity as a permanent state.
• Looks for repeatable, scalable solutions rather than one-off fixes.
• Comfortable building from scratch.
• Emotional Intelligence
• Reads the room well.
• Navigates conflict, difficult conversations, and competing stakeholder needs with maturity and empathy without losing clarity.
• Operational Discipline
• Meticulous with data integrity, documentation, and follow-through.
• People systems only work when the fundamentals are done right.
• Coaching Orientation
• Develops managers and leaders rather than solving problems for them.
• Understands that the real leverage in a People role is building capability in others.
• Navigates Complexity
• Comfortable operating across legal entities, contractor relationships, cultural contexts, and distributed teams without losing their footing.