People & Talent Operations Lead

Foundry Robotics•Emeryville, CA

4d•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. Basically, we're building robots that build robots. Our mission is to rebuild the American manufacturing industry as an AI-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer. As a founding member of our team, you will have a direct and significant impact on our product, culture, and ultimate success. This role is 100% in-person at our office in Emeryville, CA. Recruiting is a leaky bucket if the thing we hire people into does not hold them. Filling the top of the funnel is wasted motion when onboarding is an admin spreadsheet, and the people systems are just a checking box exercise and not seen as what they are: a Data goldmine for high performance. This is a systems job for someone who loves efficiency. We want the person who automates the recurring work rather than staffing around it and who runs Rippling as a real operating system rather than a filing cabinet. It also owns the mechanism that makes our hiring philosophy real: we say values drive performance and hiring decisions, and we say interview quality is part of how people here are evaluated. Neither is true until someone builds the system that makes it true - so we want someone that wants to be amazing systems with 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. We would rather you build the workflow 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. We need this number and do not have it.