Head of People
Ivo
People & HR
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Jan 7, 2026
Why Ivo?
Contract negotiation is the most time-consuming, costly, and difficult component of the contract lifecycle—and it hasn’t gotten much easier since the days of fax machines.
Large language models have unlocked the ability to solve many contract negotiation problems at scale. Our product is best-in-market (we have an 85%+ h2h trial win rate) and used by some of the leading companies in the world.
Overview:
We’re hiring our first Head of People to help us grow and support our team. Ivo is on a rapid growth trajectory and we have ambitious goals for 2026 and beyond. In order to meet these ambitious goals, our people are our secret weapon. We need to continue to hire exceptional people to come work with us and support our existing team of high calibre, humble and high performance individuals that make Ivo a great place to work.
This will be our first dedicated people operations leader at Ivo. This role is a critical component of our plan to build our high calibre team and will be responsible for all facets of people and culture at Ivo - from sourcing, to hiring, to onboarding, to employee growth and performance and team satisfaction, Our Head of People will help us define the type of organization we want to be, and attract, hire and nurture the candidates who will shape that organization.
What this role is not: This role is not for someone who wants to take a cookie-cutter, text book approach to team building and people operations. We want someone who can help us challenge the status quo, be curious and open-minded and who thinks differently about scaling and supporting teams. If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!
Key Responsibilities
- Help us scale our headcount
- Initially, the primary focus of this role will be helping us to hire the team to get us to the next growth milestone. This means both sourcing and recruiting exceptional candidates, but also helping us build frameworks to help us source candidates at scale.
- Managing interview processes, including ensuring that hiring managers are supported throughout all steps of the hiring funnel, from scheduling interviews, to collecting feedback and finalizing decision criteria.
- Supporting hiring managers with logistics and decisions relating to making offers to candidates, including providing benchmarking data (internal and external)
- Evaluate Ivo’s current people operations tech stack and headcount / team composition and help the VP of Operations determine the strategy and framework for growing a people operations team to support Ivo employees and candidates over the next 12–24 months.
- Manage all stages of candidate onboarding, from offer acceptance to the end of their ramp period.
- Be the custodian of Ivo’s brand within the hiring market - help us build a public profile that helps articulate to candidates and prospective candidates why Ivo is such a great place to work.
Performance and development
- Help team leaders develop frameworks and models for evaluating employee performance and supporting the growth and development of employees through regular promotion cycles.
- Identify and articulate key qualities or attributes that distinguish high performers within Ivo, as a way of benchmarking and levelling performance within the org.
Scaling the business
- As we expand to new regions and markets, help us hire teams and build offices in new locations. Once these teams are built, support their development
- Help the leadership determine the right composition of these new regional teams, including size and ideal candidate profiles.
Headcount & Hiring Planning
- Partner with the Finance and Operations teams to develop headcount plans aligned with financial targets and hiring velocity.
- Assist the finance team to monitor compensation budgets, bonus and commission planning and calculations, hiring costs, and organizational structure to ensure efficient scaling.
- Ensure hiring plans are closely connected with revenue, runway, and Ivo’s key metrics.
HR & Compliance
- Oversee state and federal people operations / HR compliance, including training, L&D requirements etc.
- Manage processes for employee communications and suggestions.
What You Bring
- 5-10+ years of experience in operations teams, ideally with a background or experience in building recruiting functions at early stage tech companies.
- Demonstrated prior experience building people functions from scratch in high-growth startups, especially building and developing recruiting functions.
- Experience managing teams, preferably in a people operations capacity.
- Ability to work closely with executives and department leads across operations, marketing, GTM and product / engineering, to help them build and grow their teams and their individual direct reports.
- Experience with creating growth and levelling frameworks.
- You are comfortable being both a builder and an operator - you want to help build teams to scale, but you’re also ready to do the work and support other leaders yourself.
- Pragmatism: you know when to be scrappy and when to introduce structure, and how to work with leaders in the business to help them determine when either approach makes sense.
- Agency: You operate as an owner. You naturally take accountability for your role and your function and you don’t need to wait to be told do do something.
- Growth mindset: You come to the conversation with solutions, not just problems. You’re curious to understand the specific challenges we face and ready to help us solve them with a first-principles based approach.
- Excitement at the prospect of joining a fast-growing company with potential to change the way companies operate their businesses.
Why Join Ivo
- Shape the culture and direction of a fast-growing AI legal tech company.
- Work directly with the VP of Operations and executive leadership to influence strategic people and hiring decisions.
- Over time, build a function and team your way, with strong backing from leadership.
- Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits, with the opportunity to grow into a VP-track role as the company scales.
- We offer relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship where applicable.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans for you and your family.
FAQ:
How far along are we?
We launched in early access in 2023. Since then, we’ve had an incredible response from the market and are growing rapidly. We 5x'd in ARR in the last 12 months. Our clients include companies like Canva, Quora, Zapier, Pinterest, Reddit, WordPress, and more. We're happy to share more details with candidates who go through our interview process.
Is this a chill gig?
Startups are very hard, especially if they’re growing fast. You’ll have a ton of responsibility, and there’s always an enormous amount of stuff to do. It’s hard work but the payoff is uncapped.
Can I work remotely?
We require candidates to work with us in-person 5 days a week in our San Francisco office.