Why this role, and why now

Our Chief People Officer is moving on after three and a half years. They leave behind a People Experience function that works well: predictable delivery, a capable team, a high bar on senior hiring, and a seat at the table that has been earned and respected.

If you want a CPO role where the function is broken and the mandate is to fix it, this isn't it. If you want one where the function is strong and the question is what a leader can do with that platform, keep reading.

The uncomfortable and energising fact about working here: our customers are HR leaders. What we do internally isn’t separate from what we sell. Our own practices are watched, asked about, and sometimes bought. It’s an incredible opportunity to innovate and create the future of work.

We anticipate there may be interest from current and former customers, and we welcome it! Two things worth being upfront about; applications are visible only to our Talent Acquisition and hiring teams, never to our customer-facing teams. And, being a customer earns you no advantage and no disadvantage. And, being a customer counts neither for nor against you. We'll run the same process, set the same bar, and have the same people assessing you.

What you'll own

The role has several dimensions. They are listed in order of weight, and we mean the order.

Run People Experience (PX) well

This is a critical part of the job and the thing that has to be true before anything else matters.

You'll own a strong and coherent function that delivers its cycles well and on time: performance, engagement, compensation, talent acquisition, capability, compliance across four countries. No surprises to the Exec. No escalations arriving at the CEO's desk that should have been resolved two levels down.

The bar we're setting: your deputies own outcomes, not tasks. Executives go to them directly and get good answers. You design the org ahead of the strategy rather than in response to it, so that when the business changes direction the structure is already close to right. Your team respects you, and your senior hires raise the average.

You'll be a trusted sounding board to Caroline and the Exec on structure, senior hires, compensation and the calls that don't have clean answers.

Be credible in the market and with customers

Our customers are your peers. That is a commercial asset, and we want you to use it.

You'll speak at our global events and in the market, join customer conversations, and support Sales and Customer Experience in rooms where a practitioner's view might land differently to a vendor's. Over time we'd like Sales to be asking for you by name and customers backchannelling you for advice on their own problems.

To be clear about the bar: we are not hiring a keynote speaker. You don’t need to be a world-class presenter, and polish is not what we're screening for. You need to be reliably credible on a stage and in a room, with a point of view that is specific to you rather than interchangeable with any other HR leader's. Substance over performance.

Lead on AI, personally

The incumbent Chief People Officer leads AI internally; both the technology itself, and the ways of working that are actively being shaped across that.

Sponsoring AI in name while delegating the substance won't work here. We need someone personally fluent: using these tools in their own work, building things, forming first-hand views. You'll set governance across multiple functions, that enables rather than blocks, and drive genuine adoption and behaviour change across a company with strong AI curiosity.

Done well, Culture Amp's own AI transformation becomes something we can talk about externally, and you're one of the people who can talk about it.

Influence the product

You’ll be leading our internal efforts as Customer Zero: where we are our own first and (sometimes toughest) customer.

You'll run Culture Amp on Culture Amp and give R&D feedback that's worth their time. At its best, your practitioner insight shapes product bets rather than joining the queue of stakeholder requests, and the way we use our own product internally generates narratives and proof points that Sales can use.

What we're looking for:

• You've led a people function at scale in a global, multi-country business, ideally through a period of significant change.
• You build teams strong enough to make you unnecessary in the operational detail, and you've done it before rather than intending to.
• You have judgement about organisations that people seek out: structure, senior talent, when to intervene and when not to.
• You're willing to say unpopular things to powerful people early, and you've got the track record to prove it isn't just a line in an interview.
• You're personally very capable with AI. You use it in your own work, you've built things with it, and you've set governance that enabled adoption rather than slowed it, including across functions you don't own.
• You have a view about the future of work that is yours, and you can credibly defend it in front of an audience of HR leaders.
• You're willing to be deployed commercially: joining customer calls, taking the hard practitioner questions Sales can't answer, and speaking at our events. Experience doing this already is a plus, but the appetite matters more. Over time we'd want Sales asking for you by name.
• You want to work somewhere your internal practice is externally visible, and you find that motivating rather than exposing.
• You've ideally worked in tech or SaaS, which helps with the pace and with the R&D relationship. If you haven't, we're still interested. We care more about whether you've operated at this scale and complexity than the industry you did it in.