People Operations Lead

Job Description

Rockstar is recruiting for a mission-driven healthcare company dedicated to making life happier and healthier for autistic and neurodivergent adults. Despite autism diagnoses increasing more than 5x in the past 25 years, autistic adults have been systematically overlooked. This has led to extremely poor outcomes, including high rates of co-occurring mental health conditions and a lower life expectancy. The company is here to change that.

The organization delivers specialized mental health services for autistic adults, covered by insurance. They have helped tens of thousands of people receive an autism diagnosis for the first time, work with neurodivergent-affirming therapists, and find belonging through community. Their outcomes meaningfully outperform traditional care for autistic adults, with substantially greater improvements in mood, anxiety, and quality of life.

The company is growing 3x year over year and is at mid-double-digit millions in run-rate revenue, with thousands of active clients and 400+ clinicians. It is a high-ownership, mission-driven team, building something that has never existed for autistic and neurodivergent adults.

About the Role

• The company is hiring a Sr. Manager-level People Operations Lead to own the day-to-day immediately: payroll, benefits administration, employee relations, accommodations, and terminations
• Beyond execution, they are looking for someone with the potential to grow into a strategic advisor — thinking through compensation strategy, new people systems, and how they scale the HR function as they grow
• They serve 350+ providers and 10K+ clients across multiple states, so comfort with complexity and scale matters

As the first people ops hire, this person will establish the function from the ground up. They will own the full people operations surface area—employee relations, performance management, lifecycle operations, compliance, and compensation systems. They will report into the Head of Clinical Operations, and work to turn people challenges into clean, scalable processes that protect the company while enabling fast growth.

This role requires high ownership and sound judgment. The person will personally manage investigations, coordinate with the PEO, administer pay and benefits, work with providers on accommodations requests and more. At the same time, they will build the playbooks, decision trees, and templates that make people ops repeatable and scalable, designing systems that work for 1,000+ clinicians.

If you're excited by first-principles thinking, high-stakes problem-solving, and building durable systems from scratch in a fast-moving environment, this role is designed for you.

You Will

• Lead employee relations end-to-end: Manage investigations, terminations, accommodations, and documentation in a way that is fast, calm, and legally defensible, containing issues before they escalate
• Build clinician performance management systems: Design and run playbooks, decision trees, and templates so most performance issues are resolved without CEO or Head of Clinical Ops involvement
• Operate company-wide people systems: Own PEO administration, payroll coordination, benefits administration, and policy documentation, ensuring clean execution across all employee lifecycle events
• Scale clinician lifecycle operations: Streamline onboarding, leaves of absence, exits, and role/status changes; partner with Clinical Ops and Provider Growth to support rapid scaling to 1,000+ clinicians
• Support compensation planning: Conduct competitive market reviews, help create pay bands and raise frameworks, and ensure compensation changes are executed cleanly
• Build corporate people systems: Work directly with the CEO to establish consistent processes for the corporate team, including onboarding/offboarding, performance management, and structured feedback

About You

• Have 6–10 years of experience in people operations or human resources within a startup, consulting, or high-growth operational roles, with direct exposure to employee relations and pay/benefits administration
• First-principles thinker: Don't default to "HR best practices"—dig into what's actually driving people problems, identify what needs to be solved versus what's nice-to-have, and build practical solutions for the context
• Builds for scale: Design processes that can handle 1,000+ clinicians, thinking through edge cases, failure modes, and handoff points rather than one-off solutions
• Sound judgment: Apply good judgment in messy, high-stakes situations (performance issues, investigations, terminations); know when consistency matters versus when nuance is required
• High ownership: Extremely organized and reliable; own the full people ops surface area, ensure nothing falls through the cracks, and escalate when issues carry material legal, financial, or operational risk
• Bias for action: Move quickly to contain people issues and establish clarity without creating downstream risk; comfortable with testing and iteration rather than perfect upfront design
• Hands-on with systems: Comfortable managing PEO administration, payroll coordination, compensation data in Excel, and building trackers and formulas to identify trends

Must Haves

• Employee relations experience is non-negotiable — this person will be handling sensitive situations from day one
• Strong ownership mentality; they need someone who can run this function largely independently
• NYC-based preferred, but open to remote for the right candidate

More About the Company

• The culture is a unique mix of thoughtfulness, kindness, and high-performance. They take time to eat lunch together every single day in NYC, while also setting ambitious goals and holding themselves accountable to them.
• They always ensure that they integrate perspectives from experts in the space, including clinicians and autistic self-advocates.
• The team members come from places such as Bain, McKinsey, BCG, FirstHand Health, Rula, SeatGeek, Benchling, and schools like Harvard, MIT, Yale, Penn, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, and more.

Operating Principles

• Clients first: Our job is to solve real problems for our clients. Choose what makes life better for the client, even if it’s harder for us. Never lose sight of the person on the other side.
• Find a Way: We use ingenuity, scrappiness, and determination to bend the world to accomplish our goals. We’re resourceful and do more with less.
• Raise the Bar: We grow deliberately, by asking how things can improve and by giving and seeking feedback. We insist on the highest standards and keep pushing them higher.
• Be a Good Person: Be kind, be honest, and make it fun to work here. Tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. Treat people with respect and go out of your way to do nice things for your teammates.