Senior People Programs Manager

Whatnot•Los Angeles, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together. From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone. And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business, and bring people together through commerce. We’re looking for a Senior People Programs Manager to own and evolve our core talent and performance programs at Whatnot. This role sits at the center of how performance, growth, and feedback work here – from reviews and promotions to talent reviews and culture surveys. These programs run year-round and impact every employee across the globe, so we’re looking for someone who thrives on hands-on ownership, strong execution, problem-solving, and making things simpler over time. This role is required to be within commuting distance of our New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle hubs.

Requirements

Have 7+ years of experience owning or leading company-wide talent, performance, or people programs at rapidly growing companies. You’ve seen scale, but also know how to build from the ground up.
Have deep experience supporting a global and distributed workforce
Have strong attention to detail and are highly comfortable working with data, including high proficiency in Excel to spot patterns, sanity-check outcomes, and support decisions.
Have a strong operational mindset and enjoy keeping complex, ongoing work organized, simplified, and moving forward.
Are comfortable being hands-on and recognize that no job is too small, from configuring systems to digging into data and fixing issues when they come up.
Communicate clearly and simply, especially when explaining changes or decisions to managers and teams. You’re known as a strong cross functional collaborator.
Take ownership when things don’t go as planned and focus on making them better.
Can work through differences of opinion without things getting stuck.
Prefer progress over perfection and like testing, learning, and improving over time.

Responsibilities

Own all performance cycles – Lead mid-year, year-end, and intern performance cycles from start to finish. This includes aligning stakeholders on purpose and timelines, driving communications, configuring and updating systems, prepping calibrations, and coordinating across teams. You’ll make sure the process is clear, aligned to business priorities, and easy for managers and employees.
Manage promotion, compensation, and performance workflows – Partner closely with Compensation, People Business Partners (PBPs) and other teams to ensure performance data is accurate, promotion and comp workflows run smoothly, and consistent follow-through on talent actions.
Build and maintain talent review and retention programs – Own talent reviews, top talent programs, and proactive retention efforts. Create a clear, consistent approach to identifying high performers and planning ahead as the company grows.
Run listening programs – Execute the Culture Survey and smaller, program-specific pulse surveys. Partner with Communications, People Analytics, and PBPs to analyze results and share clear, actionable insights with leaders.
Improve how things work for managers – Ensure data integrity, streamline processes, connect new-hire assessments to ongoing performance, and build practical resources that help managers have better conversations.
Partner closely across the business – Work day to day with PBPs and cross-functional teams (Comms, Compensation, People Ops, Finance, Systems) to make sure talent programs support real business needs.
Continuously improve our programs – Use data and employee feedback to spot patterns, call out what’s working (and what’s not), and recommend improvements. Test ideas, pilot changes where it makes sense, and refine what works over time.
Deeply understand the business – We’re building for both the short and long term, so knowing where the business is headed (and the nuances along the way) is critical.

Benefits

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
Work From Home Support
Home office setup allowance
Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
Care benefits
Monthly allowance for wellness
Annual allowance towards Childcare
Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
Parental Leave
16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.