People & Talent Operations Lead

Foundry Robotics•Emeryville, CA

2d•$140,000 - $175,000•Onsite

About The Position

Foundry Robotics is building an AI-native robotics manufacturing company focused on deploying advanced assembly and production capability for leading robotics companies and national-security-critical hardware. The company's mission is to rebuild the American manufacturing industry as an AI-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer. This role is 100% in-person at their office in Emeryville, CA. The position is described as a systems job for someone who loves efficiency, automating recurring work, and running HRIS systems like Rippling as a true operating system. It also owns the mechanism that makes the company's hiring philosophy real, ensuring that values drive performance and hiring decisions, and that interview quality is part of how people are evaluated. The ideal candidate will build systems using Ashby, Rippling, and other AI tools.

Requirements

Hands-on Rippling experience is required. You have configured it — workflows, permissions, reporting, integrations — not just clicked through it as an end user.
5+ years in People Operations, including real experience supporting an hourly or shift-based workforce. Office-only backgrounds will struggle here.
Extremely organized. Nothing falls through. You run a clean system and people can feel the difference.
Data-driven by instinct. You build the dashboard rather than answer the same question five times, and you can analyze attrition, retention, and span of control rather than just report them.
AI-efficient. You use AI tooling to eliminate manual work and can show us specifically what you have automated and what it saved.
High discretion. You will hold comp data, performance records, investigations, and departures. This is table stakes and we will reference-check it.
You understand multi-state employment, wage and hour, and the compliance surface of a production environment —and you can tell a senior leader something they do not want to hear, without drama.
American Citizen Required

Nice To Haves

You have built a performance cycle from nothing and can say credibly what calibration requires in order not to become theater.
ITAR, export control, or cleared-program people infrastructure.
Safety and OSHA-adjacent compliance in a production environment.
Experience using Ashby

Responsibilities

Own the infrastructure — onboarding, HRIS, payroll (in conjunction with finance), benefits, leave, immigration, and multi-state compliance — for salaried technical and commercial staff and an hourly, shift-based shop floor.
Run Rippling as the system of record and get real leverage out of it: workflows, approvals, automated onboarding and offboarding, app and device provisioning, and reporting people actually use.
Automate relentlessly. Every recurring manual process is a candidate for elimination, and AI tooling is fair game for drafting, analysis, policy summarization, and triage. Build the workflow rather than staff the workaround.
Own people data end to end: headcount, attrition and retention by manager, span of control, flight risk, etc.
Quantify what a bad hire actually costs Foundry — salary, ramp, manager hours, team churn, and the opportunity cost of the seat.