Senior People Partner

• Own the day-to-day of Sona's People function as the company scales through its next phase of growth. • Report to the Chief of Staff & VP of People (a single person, dual role), doing excellent business partnering and execution work. • Partner with senior leaders on the people decisions that matter, and build and improve the processes that help a 150+ person, globally distributed team do their best work. • Be the go-to partner for managers navigating performance conversations, probation, and difficult people decisions, while driving projects like performance management, L&D, and the systems behind a high-performance culture. • Take on a build, not a fully formed function — much of the role needs to be built from scratch or improved, with a clear path to Head of People for the right person.

• Be a People generalist comfortable spanning business partnering, ops, and project delivery. • Have worked in a startup or scaleup environment, ideally post-Series A, used to building things from scratch rather than just running established processes. • Bring a commercial mindset, understanding business strategy and organisational priorities and framing People decisions around what's right for the business. • Have personally handled performance management, probation, and difficult people situations, not just designed policy around them. • Be self-sufficient, managing senior stakeholders, navigating ambiguity, and making judgment calls without constant input. • Communicate clearly and directly, adapting your style across different audiences and levels of seniority.

• Have scaled a People function through 150–300+ headcount. • Bring international employment experience. • Have built performance management or L&D frameworks from scratch. • Have worked in an AI-first or highly process-driven People operation.

• Own the day-to-day of the People function, acting as a key business partner across the business. • Partner with managers and leaders on performance management, probation, employee relations, and people decisions. • Drive People projects — including performance management frameworks, L&D, and culture initiatives — from design through to delivery. • Help ensure operational processes are documented, AI-first, and scalable. • Work closely with the VP of People to execute the People strategy as Sona scales past 150 headcount and into new international markets.

Sona is one of the most exciting B2B SaaS companies in the UK right now. The company has raised over $100 million from world-class investors and has grown revenue by 400% in 2023 alone. Two of the three founders, Oli Johnson and Ben Dixon, previously spent six years building Catapult, a gig platform for hospitality and retail, while Steffen Wulff Petersen came from Rocket Internet, where he helped launch Lazada, HelloFresh and Payleven. That domain expertise is a genuine differentiator: Sona is not a generic scheduling tool bolted onto HR. It is built from the ground up for complex, multi-site enterprises with hundreds or thousands of frontline staff. What stands out on Glassdoor (4.6/5 from 26 reviews, 88% recommend, 94% positive business outlook) is how consistently employees praise the team culture, the benefits and the pace of growth. The compensation sub-score is a remarkable 4.9/5. Sona offers genuinely strong benefits for a startup: Bupa health insurance, 25 days holiday plus 10 flexible public holidays (with an extra day per year of service), enhanced parental leave (26 weeks full pay for primary parents, 8 weeks for secondary), share options, pension matching up to 5%, twice-yearly team retreats and a quarterly £200 learning budget. The main things to be aware of: this is a fast-paced startup where priorities shift quickly; some reviews mention long hours and pressure around headcount management; and the team is still relatively small, at around 150 people. But with a fresh $45 million Series B led by N47, US expansion underway, and the recent launch of Forge, an enterprise AI application builder that lets customers create custom software on top of Sona's platform, the company is at a genuinely exciting inflexion point.

• Earn a salary of £80,000–£95,000 with share options. • Work hybrid, with 3 days a week in the London office. • Take 35 days' annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days), with an extra day for every year of service. • Get pension contributions matched up to 5% and comprehensive health insurance. • Benefit from enhanced parental leave and pay, plus a salary sacrifice childcare scheme (workplace nursery). • Join annual, all-expenses-paid team retreats. • Receive the latest MacBook, a home-office equipment budget, and a professional development budget. • Enjoy unlimited free books.

Sona is an AI-native platform for frontline workforce management, built for the largest frontline organisations. Its end-to-end system covers Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Communications, giving organisations everything they need to staff more intelligently and empower their teams. In four years, Sona has made a deep impact on the lives of over 100,000 frontline workers, grown the team to 140+, and secured over $50M in funding from notable VCs including Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google), SpeedInvest, Antler, and Notion Capital, plus notable angels such as Tom Blomfield (Monzo).