People Systems and Automation Manager

Who are we?

Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems.

We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that.

We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft.

We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

WHY THIS ROLE?

Why this role? We're hiring a People Systems and Automation Manager to own how our People processes actually run, and to automate them.

Cohere is scaling fast. Our processes were built for a much smaller company and too many of them still depend on someone remembering to do something. That does not hold at the size we're heading toward. A useful lens; this role sees us scale through systems and leverage, not human effort.

This is a hands-on building role. You will redesign processes, build the workflows that execute them across Rippling, Slack, Notion and the rest of our stack, and own offboarding and our employee support model outright. You cannot automate a process well without running one, so you will do both. You will own the outcome, not just the design.

You'll join a small HR Operations team during our Rippling implementation, which means greenfield opportunity and real influence over how this function works for the next few years.

What you'll do

Design the process, then automate it

• Map how our People processes actually work today, not how they're supposed to

• Redesign them before automating, so we don't lock in problems we already have

• Build workflows and automations across our HRIS and wider tooling

• Design for the exceptions, not just the standard path

Own the employee lifecycle end to end

• Take responsibility for how joiners, movers and leavers are executed. You will be laser focused on removing human interaction in processes.

• Close the gaps between People, IT, Finance and Payroll where work currently falls through.

• Build the internal mobility processes that are often neglected; promotions, transfers, manager changes, entity changes etc.

Remove manual handling and human error

• Find where we're doing things by hand and take the work out

• Cut down what employees and managers have to ask us for in the first place

• Measure what you've removed, in hours, tickets or errors

Document everything

• Write SOPs and runbooks people actually use

• Make sure what you build can be maintained by someone else

• Keep our process documentation as a real source of truth rather than a folder nobody opens

Build for what's coming

• Design processes that hold as we grow and as we mature toward audit and compliance requirements

• Work with IT and Finance on the controls and evidence our processes need to produce

YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU

• Have built People Ops/HR Systems at a company that grew fast, ideally through a doubling

• Have been through an HRIS implementation or migration and know what it costs

• Have personally built workflows and automations in HR systems or adjacent tooling, and are comfortable working with triggers, conditions, integrations and failure modes.

• Think in systems, and can talk about triggers, conditions, failure modes and edge cases

• Know what not to automate, and can explain why

• Write clearly and document by default

• Have run operations across multiple countries and entities, including EOR or contractor populations

• Are comfortable anywhere across the employee journey, from hire

Responsibilities

• Map how People processes actually work today, not how they're supposed to
• Redesign processes before automating them so existing problems are not locked in
• Build workflows and automations across our HRIS and wider tooling (including Rippling, Slack, Notion)
• Design for exceptions, not just the standard path
• Take responsibility for how joiners, movers and leavers are executed with a focus on removing human interaction
• Close gaps between People, IT, Finance and Payroll where work currently falls through
• Build internal mobility processes including promotions, transfers, manager changes, and entity changes
• Find manual tasks and take the work out to cut down employee and manager requests
• Measure what you've removed in hours, tickets or errors
• Write SOPs and runbooks that people actually use
• Keep process documentation as a real source of truth
• Design processes that hold as the company grows and matures toward audit and compliance requirements
• Work with IT and Finance on controls and evidence our processes need to produce

Requirements

• Have built People Ops/HR Systems at a company that grew fast, ideally through a doubling
• Have been through an HRIS implementation or migration and know what it costs
• Have personally built workflows and automations in HR systems or adjacent tooling, and are comfortable working with triggers, conditions, integrations and failure modes
• Think in systems, and can talk about triggers, conditions, failure modes and edge cases
• Know what not to automate and can explain why
• Write clearly and document by default
• Have run operations across multiple countries and entities, including EOR or contractor populations
• Are comfortable anywhere across the employee journey, from hire