Head Of People

Head of People – DesignGuru 📍 Remote | Full-Time

DesignGuru is a subscription design agency doing $170k+ MRR with 130+ B2B clients — built without a single round of VC funding.

No bloated headcount. No Silicon Valley ego. Just fast, quality design work and a team that genuinely gives a damn.

Weve grown to 65 people across the globe and were not slowing down. Now we need someone to make sure the people side of this business keeps pace with everything else.

This is a founding people role. Theres no team to inherit, no dusty HR handbook to follow. Youll build the function in your own image - and shape how 65 (soon to be more) people experience working here.

What youll own:

→ Recruitment — owning end-to-end hiring across design, ops, and commercial. Building pipelines, running processes, and finding people who actually fit — not just on paper.

→ Performance Management — creating frameworks that help managers have real conversations, set meaningful goals, and develop their teams. Not box-ticking. Actual growth.

→ Retention & Engagement — understanding why people stay and why they leave, and doing something about it. We want low churn on people, not just clients.

→ Culture & Values — defining what DesignGuru stands for as an employer and making sure that shows up in day-to-day reality, not just a slide deck.

→ People Strategy — working directly with the founder to think 12–24 months ahead. What does the team need to look like as we scale? Where are the gaps before they become problems?

→ L&D — building lightweight learning pathways that help our designers and team leads grow without needing enterprise budgets.

→ Ops & Compliance — keeping us right on contracts, policies, and employment law across our geographies. Were global — it matters.

Who you are:

→ Youve worked in a fast-growing startup or agency and youve been the first or second people hire. You know what it means to build without a playbook.

→ You think in systems but youre not precious about process for processs sake. If something isnt working, you kill it. If it is, you scale it.

→ You care genuinely about employee experience — but youre commercially switched on. You understand that culture has to support growth, not slow it down.

→ You can communicate. Clearly, directly, and without HR jargon. People trust you because you say what you mean.

→ Youre not intimidated by scale or pace. 65 people across multiple time zones and its only going one direction — you see that as an opportunity, not a problem.

What you wont get: A big HR team. Loads of existing infrastructure. Easy, low-stakes problems.

What you will get: A blank canvas. Direct access to the founder. The chance to build a people function that actually matters to 65 humans who show up every day - and the ones we havent hired yet.

Were doing this without VC money, which means every good hire compounds and every bad one costs.

Youll feel that weight - and if that excites you rather than scares you, youre probably our person.