The posting
As the Director of People at vCluster Labs, you aren't just administering HR programs; you are the builder who turns people strategy into things that actually ship. Reporting to the VP of People, you will design and implement the strategic programs, tools, and infrastructure behind a company that doubled in a year and employs people in 21 countries. You will approach every problem AI-first, building tooling and automations that let a small people team support everyone building vCluster at the scale of a much larger one. If you want to invent how a modern people function works instead of copying how legacy ones did, this is the seat.
AS THE DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE, YOUR ROLE WILL INCLUDE:
- Strategic Programs and People Innovation: You partner with the VP of People to turn people strategy into programs that land. You will take initiatives from idea to rollout, including compensation reviews, performance cycles, and new programs we haven't built yet, then measure what worked and iterate.
- AI-First People Tooling: You build with AI before you reach for headcount or manual process. You will extend the AI tools and agents we already use across recruiting and people operations, and create new ones for onboarding, policy questions, manager support, and reporting.
- Global Employment and Compliance: You own employment compliance across every country we operate in, including our team in Germany. You will work with outside counsel to get contracts, statutory benefits, working time rules, works council obligations, and terminations right.
- Operations Infrastructure: You manage our EOR setup, help decide with Finance when a country has earned its own entity, and keep Rippling accurate as our system of record. You will build the policies and lifecycle processes that take us from 130 people to 250 and beyond.
- Leadership Development: You create and run leadership training for managers across every region. Most of our managers are leading people for the first time at this scale, and you will give them practical tools for feedback, performance conversations, and running a distributed team.
- Culture and Engagement: You design and run culture programs and events globally, from company offsites to local team gatherings to the remote rituals that keep 21 countries feeling like one company. You will measure what people actually value and cut what they don't.
THIS ROLE COULD BE A FIT FOR YOU IF YOU BRING:
- Experience: You have 8+ years in HR or People Operations, including at least 3 years building global people programs at a US-headquartered, high-growth technology company.
- German Workforce and Global Employment: You have directly managed employment for a German workforce, including contracts, notice periods, works councils, data privacy, and terminations, and you have hands-on EOR and entity experience across the US, EMEA, and other regions.
- Remote Team Support: You have supported a remote team spread across many time zones, and you know how to run programs, training, and employee support asynchronously so no location feels like an afterthought.
- Rippling Fluency: You have run Rippling as an HRIS and payroll platform and know how to keep employee, payroll, and ATS data in agreement.
- AI-First Builder: You use AI tools daily and have built real workflows, agents, or automations that replaced manual people work, not just experimented with chatbots.
- Program Builder: You have built leadership training and culture programs from scratch that people actually showed up for, and you see programs through to a measurable outcome.
BONUS POINTS FOR:
- Rippling EOR: Experience employing people through Rippling's EOR offering.
- Hands-On Building: Comfort with no-code automation platforms, APIs, or light scripting to connect people systems.
- Total Rewards Exposure: Experience building global pay bands or administering equity across multiple jurisdictions.
- Infrastructure Context: Time at an open source, developer tools, or infrastructure company.
- Immigration: Working knowledge of visas and work authorization in the US and EU.
ABOUT VCLUSTER LABS
We're the #1 platform for AI infrastructure, trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI cloud builders. We're a venture-backed startup that's raised over $28M from top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, and DoorDash), and we're in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to join our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe with a remote-first culture.
We give AI Cloud providers and AI factories a hyperscaler-like experience on their own GPU infrastructure. Our platform runs the full stack an operator needs, from bare metal provisioning and node lifecycle management up through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters, so they can turn raw GPUs into cluster products they can sell in days instead of spending 12+ months building it themselves. Today we power over 100,000 GPUs and 1 million CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies, backed by a team of 40+ infrastructure engineers who build alongside our customers rather than just shipping them software.
We're the company behind vCluster, the open source technology for tenant isolation on Kubernetes, with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021. Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI, a Kubernetes-native framework built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.
Benefits
We offer the following benefits:
- Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Premium Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).
- Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.
- Workplace Flexibility: We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.
CULTURE & VALUES
At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:
1. Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business.
2. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.
3. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.
4. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.
5. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.
