People Operations Partner

Tensec•Palo Alto, CA

9d•$128,000 - $135,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Tensec is Vertical AI for cross-border trade. Trade is two flows, money and goods, and the trading companies that move them: freight forwarders, shipping lines, customs brokers, 4PLs — still run both on systems built for large corporations and a lot of manual work. Tensec is the agentic AI layer those companies use to move both flows for their importer and exporter clients: FX and payments today, quoting and booking next, trade finance to follow. Cross-border B2B is a $50 trillion market. We're building the version everyone else can use. We started in the US, Mexico, and Brazil and are expanding globally, onboarding enterprise trading companies whose trade flows run to billions of dollars a year across every major corridor. Founded in 2023 by a team that has built and exited startups and run global teams at Meta, PayPal, Credit Karma, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Tensec is backed by world-class investors such as Quiet Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Renegade Partners, Clocktower, and WillowTree. Your mission Tensec is hiring across three countries and adding more. Right now, People Ops runs on tribal knowledge and one-off fixes, you're here to change that. You will build the policies, workflows, and systems that let the employee lifecycle scale without scaling headcount, and you will own the tools that make it real.

Requirements

4+ years in People Operations or HR Operations, ideally at a tech company that grew fast enough to outgrow its own processes.
Hands-on HRIS administration, including configuring workflows and fields.
A track record of turning a manual, inconsistent process into a documented, standardized one, and getting others to actually follow it.
Experience working across more than one country or legal jurisdiction.
Bilingual in English and Spanish or, English and Portuguese.
Based in Palo Alto, CA, with 3 days per week in our Palo Alto office.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a technology company.
Exposure to Brazilian or Mexican labor law and statutory benefits administration.

Responsibilities

Own employee onboarding end to end across Brazil, Mexico, and the US, ensuring new hires show up to a process that's documented, consistent, and doesn't depend on you personally remembering what's next.
Document, version, and standardize every People Ops policy, procedure, and workflow: onboarding, offboarding, leave, benefits administration, across all three markets, enabling employees to self-serve instead of opening a ticket.
Automate manual work, aiming for fewer manual touches per employee action.
Own HRIS configuration end to end: workflows, approval chains, fields, integrations. Build solutions within the system when issues arise or new processes are needed, rather than using spreadsheets.
Evaluate new HR tech tools against business needs (cost, fit, implementation lift) and make decisions on adoption or rejection. Implement championed tools and discontinue those that do not prove valuable.
Actively hunt for operational gaps and fix them before they cause a problem.
Serve as the front-line owner of People Ops tickets and questions from employees and managers across all three markets.
Partner with Legal and Operations to ensure policies comply with CLT, Mexican labor law, and US employment law.
Run the annual open enrollment cycle, including communicating deadlines, processing elections correctly, and handling escalations without last-minute rushes.
Ensure LOA processes are documented and applied consistently under US, Brazilian (CLT), and Mexican requirements.
Audit existing HR workflows to identify opportunities for automation and build business cases for prioritization.
Support compensation cycles, performance review cycles, and org-chart changes with clean, accurate HRIS data.
Collaborate with recruiting and finance to maintain reconciliation of headcount, compensation, and systems data.
Ensure compliance requirements across jurisdictions are met on time.