Sr. HR Business Partner-R&D

Trend Micro•Austin, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

TrendAI™, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk. At TrendAI™, we’re always seeking exceptional talent; people who want to collaborate with the best and push boundaries together. Here, your work goes beyond building a career. You will help protect what matters and play a vital role in shaping a safer, more trustworthy AI-powered future. We're building next-generation security products that require deep systems thinking, and we need an equally thoughtful HR partner. This role supports Engineering leadership within R&D Americas, reporting to the VP, People Americas. You'll own talent management, organization design, employee relations, and culture/engagement for a growing engineering organization, with close partnership with Product leadership on cross-functional priorities. You'll be a partner who asks hard questions: Why do we level engineers the way we do? Does our compensation banding reflect what the market demands and what makes sense for career progression? How do we keep a high-performing, fast-moving team healthy as we scale? This is a role for someone who thrives when things are undefined. You'll have the autonomy to shape practices, the expectation to challenge assumptions, and a data first mindset to back up your recommendations.

Requirements

8+ years of HRBP or strategic HR experience, with at least 5+ years supporting R&D, engineering, or technical organizations.
Deep experience in a tech company environment. You understand how engineers are developed, motivated, and leveled. You've navigated the unique tension between individual contributor depth and management growth.
Expertise in leveling frameworks, compensation banding, and career architecture. You've built, redesigned, or significantly improved these in a previous role and can speak to the trade-offs.
Strong analytical and data-driven mindset. You're comfortable with AI tools, Excel, and dashboards. You ask "what does the data actually show?" before making recommendations.
Track record of change management and influence. You've driven HR initiatives that required buy-in from skeptical or busy leaders. You know how to pilot, learn, and iterate.
Demonstrated curiosity and intellectual humility. You ask "why are we doing this?" and you're genuinely interested in the answer, whether it's valid or just "because we always have." You're comfortable challenging assumptions, including your own.
Excellent communication and relationship-building skills. You can write a clear business case, facilitate a difficult conversation, and influence leaders who think differently than you do.
Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship, both currently and moving forward.
The company will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this role (including, but not limited to, H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT, or any other employment-based visa).

Nice To Haves

Global HR experience. You've navigated multi-region or multi-country HR challenges and understand how practices need to vary by market.
Experience with rapid scaling. You've grown an organization from 30 to 300 engineers (or similar) and learned what breaks when you scale.
Familiarity with AI/ML, security, or other complex technical domains. Not required, but helpful for context-setting conversations with leadership.
Prior experience designing or improving promotion/leveling processes. You've seen what works and what creates bottlenecks.
Experience with compensation equity analysis and market benchmarking.

Responsibilities

Own talent planning and development conversations for R&D Americas leadership and key ICs as the organization scales.
Partner with engineering leadership to define, iterate, and communicate leveling frameworks. Question existing title and compensation bands; recommend changes backed by market data, internal equity analysis, and career progression logic.
Partner with corporate HR to translate global talent programs into regional execution, ensuring promotion cycles, performance calibration, and compensation reviews are transparent, data-driven, and defensible in the R&D context.
Lead org design conversations as R&D grows. Challenge structural assumptions - how teams are organized, where decision-making authority sits, how to maintain speed and clarity at scale.
Work directly with engineering leadership to anticipate org gaps, redundancies, and opportunities before they become friction points. Maintain close partnership with Product leadership on cross-functional coordination.
Think systemically about how org decisions cascade: a change in how teams are staffed affects career paths, compensation equity, and hiring strategy.
Be the strategic voice on employee relations issues in R&D. Own investigations, conflict resolution, and broader patterns that suggest cultural or structural problems.
Actively listen to R&D teams; translate feedback into insights about what's working, what's breaking, and what needs to change.
Partner on culture initiatives that reflect TrendAI's values (curiosity, innovation, bias toward action) within an R&D context where the work is technically complex and security-critical.
Work directly with engineering leadership and finance to align R&D's people practices with broader company strategy. Maintain close partnership with Product on talent and organizational matters that impact cross-functional execution.
Drive initiatives that require influence without authority - leveling redesigns, new comp structures, new hiring approaches - by building business cases, piloting, and learning.
Be a translator: help corporate HR understand Engineering's specific needs; help Engineering leadership understand HR constraints and opportunities. Coordinate closely with Product on shared organizational priorities.
Use data to ground decisions. Track leveling distribution, compensation equity, retention by level/team, promotion velocity, and hiring pipeline health. Spot trends before they become crises.
Build dashboards and narratives that help leadership see what's actually happening vs. what they assume is happening.