Sutra.AI
Website:
sutra.ai
Job details:
Head - People Success
Type: Full-time
Location: Delhi NCR / Bhopal (Remote today; office-based once our India office opens)
Experience: 15+ YOE in human resources, including proven global team building
Reports to: President, India
Manages: People Success function across India and the United States
About Sutra.AI
Sutra.AI is a complete 'Data to Value' AI business transformation platform designed specifically for Business Builders. Unlike other platforms that cater to AI Builders or large enterprises with substantial budgets, Sutra.AI is purpose-built for mid-market businesses without the need of AI expertise. Developed over 4 years, Sutra.AI is a patent-pending fully orchestrated AI SaaS platform. It identifies and executes AI use cases to enhance operational efficiency, customer experience, revenue growth, profitability, innovation, and risk reduction.
Role Overview
The Head - People Success is the single point of accountability for talent acquisition, org design, performance, total rewards, engagement, culture, people operations and statutory compliance across all geographies in which Sutra.AI operates.
The role partners directly with the President (India), the founder and functional heads on structure, hiring sequence and workforce spend. It is expected to challenge those decisions with evidence, not to implement them unquestioned.
Base Location should be Delhi NCR / Bhopal.
What You'll Do
1. Talent Acquisition & Employer Brand
- Build the hiring engine end to end: role scorecards, structured interview loops, calibration standards and interviewer training.
- Own sourcing strategy and channel economics across inbound, referral, outbound, agency and partner channels; know the cost per hire and quality per channel.
- Own how Sutra.AI is perceived by the candidates we most want to attract, including careers presence, candidate experience and offer-stage conversion.
- Establish a house standard for job descriptions, levelling language and hiring collateral across all functions.
- Close the loop between scorecard and hire quality, and let that evidence reshape how future roles are scoped.
2. Global Team Building & Employment Structure
- Design and run hiring, onboarding and people operations across India and the United States.
- Own contractor-versus-employee decisions, own-entity versus EOR calls, and regional employment contract structures; defend each call commercially.
- Build compensation benchmarking that holds across every market we hire in.
- Establish onboarding that produces productive contributors, not oriented ones, within a defined window.
3. Org Design & Workforce Planning
- Partner with leadership on structure, spans, layers and hiring sequence, anchored to the operating plan rather than to demand.
- Build and maintain a rolling headcount plan tied to revenue and runway.
- Resolve reporting-line and title inconsistencies across the existing organisation and establish a single levelling taxonomy.
- Tell leadership when we are hiring the wrong role at the wrong time, and specify what to hire instead.
4. Performance, Career Frameworks & Total Rewards
- Design career frameworks and competency ladders per function, defining what good looks like at each level.
- Build a performance cycle from first principles that managers and employees find useful, and that makes promotion decisions defensible.
- Own levelling, banding and the annual compensation cycle across both markets, including internal equity management.
- Own ESOP administration and the employee education that makes equity comprehensible.
- Build a recognition programme that rewards behaviour and outcomes rather than tenure.
5. Engagement, Retention & Wellbeing
- Own team health as a measured number: eNPS, pulse surveys, skip-levels and stay interviews.
- Act on what listening mechanisms surface and close the loop visibly.
- Keep regretted attrition low, and diagnose the true cause behind every exit.
- Make working at Sutra.AI feel connected for people who may never share an office.
6. Culture & Internal Communication
- Build the rituals, communication rhythms and feedback loops that make two time zones operate as one company.
- Establish written and verbal communication norms appropriate to a distributed, senior team.
- Keep culture deliberate rather than accidental as headcount grows.
7. People Operations & Compliance
- Own HRIS selection and implementation, policy, payroll coordination and the people data layer.
- Own statutory compliance in India (PF, ESI, POSH, gratuity, S&E, labour codes) and equivalent obligations in the United States and any subsequent geography.
- Build documentation and audit readiness ahead of customer, investor and certification requirements. Our customers operate in healthcare, financial services, aviation and defence-adjacent sectors and will audit our controls.
- Partner with Engineering and Platform on people-side controls relevant to ISO 27001, SOC 2 and equivalent frameworks.
8. Leadership Coaching
- Act as a thought partner to the founders and functional heads on structure, talent and organisational decisions.
- Coach first-time managers into competent ones.
- Have the hard conversations that nobody else in the company is positioned to have, including with leadership.
Focus Areas (Outcomes)
- Hiring: Predictable, forecastable hiring with a defensible quality bar.
- Structure: A levelled, coherent organisation with clear reporting lines and no duplicated accountability.
- Rewards: Compensation that is benchmarked, internally equitable and explainable by managers.
- Retention: Measured team health, low regretted attrition and diagnosed causes.
- Governance: Clean statutory compliance and audit-ready people operations in every geography.
What We're Looking For
Must-Have
- Experience: 15+ years in human resources, including 5+ years owning the function as Head of HR, VP People or CHRO.
- Global Team Building: Demonstrated hiring and people operations across at least two countries; India and the United States preferred.
- Compensation Architecture: Built levelling and compensation frameworks from scratch, not inherited and maintained them.
- Compliance Depth: Fluent in Indian statutory and payroll obligations, with practical working knowledge of US employment requirements.
- Environment: Direct experience in startups or fast-growth technology environments; comfortable operating as the entire function before building a team.
- Talent Market Knowledge: Has hired engineering, data and GTM talent under pressure and understands those markets specifically.
- Stakeholder Management: Proven credibility as a coach and challenger to founders and senior leaders.
Preferred
- Experience scaling an organisation from approximately 50 to 300+ people.
- ESOP design, administration and employee education experience.
- Experience establishing a US entity or EOR arrangement operated from India.
- Exposure to SaaS or AI technology landscapes.
- Experience supporting ISO 27001, SOC 2 or comparable certification from the people-controls side.
This role is NOT for you if
- You need an existing process to run rather than a blank page.
- You view people as downstream of business decisions rather than shaping them.
- You are uncomfortable disagreeing with founders in the room.
- You require permanently remote work. The base location requirement is firm.
Core Competencies
Technical & Functional Competencies
- Talent Acquisition Systems: Scorecard design, structured interviewing, calibration, funnel forecasting and channel economics.
- Organisation Design: Structure, spans and layers, levelling taxonomy, decision rights and workforce planning against an operating plan.
- Total Rewards: Multi-market benchmarking, banding, internal equity, annual cycle design and equity administration.
- Performance Systems: Competency frameworks, review philosophy, promotion governance and manager enablement.
- People Analytics: Attrition, engagement and hiring data used diagnostically, not descriptively.
- Employment Law & Compliance: India statutory obligations, US employment requirements, cross-border employment structures.
- Distributed Team Leadership: Culture, ritual and communication design across time zones.
Behavioural Competencies
- Structural Thinking: Sees duplicated or absent accountability in a messy org and can articulate the fix.
- Candour: Disagrees in the room rather than afterwards, with evidence, and commits fully once decided.
- Data Fluency: Substantiates claims with cohort, manager and period-level evidence.
- Ownership: Operates without oversight and closes problems rather than reporting them.
- Written Clarity: Writes precisely, recognising that in a distributed company unclear writing is unclear thinking at scale.
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