VP of People

Orbital • New York, NY

9d • $220,000 - $300,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Orbital is the AI platform for real estate legal work. Real estate shapes the world around us: our homes, our workplaces and our cultural landmarks. It’s the infrastructure that powers everyday life and is the world's largest asset class. Yet behind every single deal, real estate and legal teams work hard to navigate decades-old complexity; manually connecting documents, hidden obligations, geo-spatial context, and multiple parties into a path forward. We connect the legal and physical record, so that path is clearer than ever before. Our mission is to make real estate transactions faster, clearer, and less manual. Here, you'll be part of changing how the deals behind the largest asset class get transacted, and will help shape the future of real estate.

A bit about us:
🚀 We’re building at the forefront of AI technology, without losing the deeply human expertise our clients depend on.
🏢 Orbital is built with former practising real estate lawyers and 250+ years of combined legal expertise. We're purpose-built for the complexity of real estate: accelerating due diligence, drafting and negotiation, and deal coordination with legal-grade precision.
💰 We've just raised a $60m Series B, led by Brighton Park Capital, to accelerate our global expansion – $75m raised to date.
🤝 We're trusted by 5,000+ real estate professionals, spanning UK Magic Circle and US Am Law 100 firms, to household names like M&S. Leading firms like BCLP, Orrick, Goodwin, Womble Bond Dickinson and Clifford Chance rely on Orbital to remove the busywork, freeing legal and real estate teams to focus on sharp judgment, standout client service, and closing deals faster.
💡 Working at Orbital means joining a bold, ambitious team, with the trust to take ownership and make a real impact from day one.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading a People function at senior level (VP, CPO, or equivalent). You bring real depth across the people discipline. That foundation is essential, but what sets you apart is the ability to operate beyond it.
• A track record of sitting at the leadership table and influencing business decisions, not just delivering a People agenda within one.
• Strong commercial instincts. You understand how businesses make money, what impacts delivery, where growth gets stuck, and how organizational design affects all of it.
• Experience scaling a business through the 100-to-250 headcount phase, with the judgment to know what matters at each stage.
• Senior-level fluency with the US market as an employer, including compensation norms, talent dynamics, and the regulatory landscape that shape how People functions operate at scale.
• Experience leading a People function across multiple geographies, with the judgment to run a distributed team and a clear grasp of how labor markets, employment frameworks, and cultural norms differ between regions.
• The ability to translate business context into a people and organizational strategy, and to challenge existing priorities when the business context demands it.
• Experience leading through a People team, setting direction and standards without owning every deliverable.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience of a Series B to Series C growth journey.
• Built out a People function from an early-stage base, rather than inherited one.
• Familiarity with the Built for People framework or equivalent product-led thinking applied to People.

Responsibilities

• Lead from the business. Your first team is the leadership team. You'll be part of commercial, product, and strategic conversations, bringing a people leader's perspective to business challenges rather than representing the People function in isolation. From there, you'll form your own view on where the company's growth is constrained, where organizational design is helping or hindering, and what the business needs to execute its plan. You'll help the leadership team pressure-test growth plans against organizational readiness, spot where management quality, role clarity, or team structure are becoming bottlenecks, and ensure that how we hire, develop, reward, retain, and structure teams is aligned with where the business is heading.
• Set the People agenda from business context. You won't be given a predefined project list. Instead, you'll assess what you learn from the business and set the people and organizational priorities from there, drawing on the People Directors strategic insight and operational knowledge from within the function to inform your thinking. That means making sure areas like organizational design, performance management, manager capability, onboarding, compensation strategy, benefits, career progression, and people systems are pointed at the right business problems and prioritized accordingly. A major part of the brief is translating current business realities into a sharper People mandate and challenging existing priorities when the business context demands it.
• Strengthen manager capability and performance. How Orbital defines, enables, and recognizes high performance is one of the biggest opportunities for this role to shape. You'll set the standard for what good management looks like here, shape how performance, progression, and recognition are assessed across the company, and hold your peers on the leadership team accountable for the quality of management on their own teams.
• Develop the People team. You'll be the consistent presence the team anchors around, invest in their growth, develop clear ownership within the function, and be accountable for the team's development over time, not just its immediate output. Over time, you'll shape an AI-first, high-leverage function that combines strategic leadership, people product thinking, manager enablement, and operational backbone.

Benefits

• Competitive starting salary in the range of $250,000-$300,000, depending on experience.
• 401k match and equity options in a fast-growing start-up.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents.
• 20 days paid holiday (plus public holidays).
• Generous parental leave policy designed to support all parents and caregivers in balancing family and work life, in addition to any state-mandated paid family leave entitlements.
• Professional equipment and personal development budget along with training opportunities to learn and develop your skills.
• Pre-tax commuter benefits to help you get to and from the office.
• Regular team off-sites, shared lunches, and social events.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed