People Operations Manager

No one should suffer from a treatable skin disease because they couldn’t access care. That’s what Honeydew is fixing — a platform connecting hundreds of millions of people to licensed dermatologists, FDA-approved treatments, and ongoing skin health support. We’ve helped 40,000+ patients get life-changing results, we’re growing 5x YoY, and we’re just getting started.

We are at a critical inflection point, scaling from 170 to 500+ Honeydoers.

As our People Ops Manager, you will be the operational backbone and strategic nerve center of Honeydew. This role sits at the intersection of business operations and people strategy — you’ll help manage the full scope of people ops, from the systems and documentation that keep us compliant and organized, to the strategic partnership that helps our supervisors and managers build and scale their teams effectively. Legal and compliance fluency is the foundation we expect you to bring; what we’re building here is everything above it. This is an IC role with a clear path to leadership as the team expands.

At Honeydew, we focus on outcomes over activities. In your first 180 days, you will lead the charge on these three key outcomes:

1. Scale the Infrastructure: Audit and formalize our people systems and processes to support a 3x increase in headcount, creating new processes from scratch where none exist — including compensation cycle infrastructure, benefits administration and open enrollment, and employment documentation workflows (offer letters, commission agreements, employment records).

2. Embed in the Business: Get deep on how Honeydew operates — the teams, the growth levers, the org dependencies. Within 180 days, you’ll be the partner leaders come to when thinking about team structure, leveling, headcount planning, and how to scale their functions effectively.

3. Uplevel Leadership: Implement a structured coaching and training framework to transform our "people managers" into "people leaders."

• Operational Backbone: Own HR fundamentals, people data + metrics, and leveling frameworks to provide a clear picture of your workforce and how people are positioned within it.

• Advisor & Coach: Act as a strategic partner to our leads, bringing a coaching mindset to performance management and team dynamics.

• Change Management: Lead the organization through the inevitable friction of rapid scaling, ensuring shifts in process are met with clarity and buy-in.

• Employee Experience: Architect the retention and engagement strategies that make Honeydew a world-class place to work for a diverse, distributed team, including owning internal communications, the employee wiki, and People team updates.

• Builder: Proactively identify gaps, build scalable processes and documentation from scratch, and continuously look for ways to automate and streamline — with AI tools, smarter workflows, and better use of existing systems.

The Non-Negotiables:

• Rapid Scale Experience: You’ve been in the trenches during a 100 > 500+ employee growth spurt at a tech or tech-enabled company and know exactly what breaks at each stage. Ideally more than once.

• Tech Workforce Expertise: You have meaningful experience supporting both non-exempt and exempt workforces - with non-exempt being a significant part of your background - in a tech or tech-enabled environment. We need someone who understands the specific dynamics of a remote, tech-enabled hourly workforce alongside a salaried knowledge-worker population; we are not looking for physical workforce experience from retail, hospitality, or manufacturing.

• Business Acumen: You understand how companies operate - revenue drivers, team dependencies, org design tradeoffs. People Ops decisions don’t happen in a vacuum for you; you connect them back to business outcomes and speak the language of the teams you support.

• Project Mastery: You own multiple concurrent workstreams without dropping balls. You drive initiatives from inception to completion and build scalable processes as readily as you execute tactical one-offs.

• Creative Problem Solving: You don’t just follow the HR handbook; you proactively anticipate potential issues and you think like a business operator when solving people challenges, designing solutions that fit the actual context - not the textbook answer.

• High EQ & Grit: You thrive in high-stress situations, manage ambiguity with ease, and can have difficult conversations that leave people feeling supported.

• Systems Ownership: Hands-on experience administering Justworks (or equivalent PEO), and HRIS systems - you’ve owned these platforms, not just used them.

The Nice-to-Haves:

• AI Fluency: Experience building AI-powered or agentic workflows. You know how to use modern tools to automate the tedious and amplify the strategic — and you’re curious about where this technology is headed.

• Founding Impact: You’ll help build the department, not just inherit it. Your work will have a permanent impact on the org's DNA.

• Unparalleled Growth: You will learn by doing in an environment that is "challenging in a good way."

• Total Rewards:

  • Full remote flexibility (Outcome-focused M-F)

  • Meaningful Equity (Stock Options)

  • Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance

  • 401(k) + Match

  • Flex PTO

  • $100 Monthly Tech Stipend