---
title: 'People Operations Lead at Arena Intelligence, Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-lead-arena-intelligence-inc-bay-area-mggcxgekqbhp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# People Operations Lead at Arena Intelligence, Inc.

- **Company:** Arena Intelligence, Inc.
- **Location:** Bay Area
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/arena/4cbc2bd8-24e1-4100-862c-ea93651b4cb7/application

**Skills:** Modern AI tools

> Design and scale HR programs including onboarding, performance, and compensation while acting as an HR business partner to leadership. Build lightweight processes, advise on org design, and drive culture initiatives in a fast-moving startup environment.

## Job description

## About Arena Intelligence

Arena is the platform for evaluating how AI models perform in the real world. Founded by researchers from UC Berkeley's SkyLab, we're on a mission to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use, and to build the foundation for everyone to understand, shape, and benefit from it.

Tens of millions of people use Arena each month to evaluate how frontier systems handle the work they actually do. The preferences they share power the most transparent, rigorous, and human-centered evaluations in AI. Leading AI labs, enterprises, and independent researchers rely on our work and open datasets to understand how models behave in real workflows: agentic coding, creative generation, professional productivity, and beyond. We go beyond leaderboards and decompose what human experience reveals about AI, so models advance toward the work people actually do.

We're a team of researchers, academics, builders, and creatives from UC Berkeley, Google, Stanford, and DeepMind. We seek truth, move fast, and value craftsmanship, curiosity, and impact over hierarchy. We're building a company where thoughtful, curious people from all backgrounds can do their best work together, in an office culture that radiates excellence, energy, and focus.

## About the Role

Arena Intelligence is seeking an experienced People Operations Lead to design and scale HR programs, including onboarding, performance, and compensation, while acting as an HR business partner to leadership. The role involves building lightweight processes, advising on org design and employee relations, driving culture initiatives, managing compliance, and proactively addressing people infrastructure gaps, all within a fast moving startup environment. You'll work closely with leadership to create systems that scale, guide managers through critical people decisions, and shape the employee experience from the ground up. Reporting to the Head of People, you'll be a key partner in building a thoughtful, high performing organization. Success in this role requires someone who can move comfortably between strategic initiatives and hands on execution, bringing structure where it's needed without creating unnecessary process. If you're energized by building, enjoy solving people challenges in real time, and want meaningful ownership over how a company grows, we'd love to connect.

You’ll

- Build and evolve foundational programs including onboarding, performance management, compensation, career development, and other initiatives that support company growth.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to leaders, providing guidance on team effectiveness, organizational design, employee relations, and people decisions.
- Create lightweight systems and processes that improve consistency while preserving speed and flexibility.
- Help shape an environment where employees can do their best work, driving initiatives that strengthen engagement, communication, and team health.
- Ensure the fundamentals are operating smoothly, from policies and documentation to compliance and employee lifecycle management.
- Partner with leadership on headcount planning, organizational structure, and evolving team needs.
- Identify gaps before they become bottlenecks, building the frameworks and tools needed to support a growing organization.

You’ll have

- 6+ years of experience building People programs in an early stage or high growth environment where adaptability and execution mattered as much as expertise.
- Strong HR business partnering skills and the ability to translate business goals into practical people strategies.
- Sound judgment when navigating sensitive employee situations, balancing empathy with accountability.
- A builder's mindset. You enjoy creating systems from scratch and improving them as the organization evolves.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and making progress without waiting for perfect information.
- A practical approach to People Operations that focuses on outcomes rather than process for process's sake.
- Familiarity with modern AI tools and a curiosity about how technology can improve internal workflows is a plus.

## What we offer

- We offer competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based. The base salary range will depend on the candidate’s permanent work location.
- Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
- The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team
- A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact

Come help build the space where anyone can explore and help shape the future of AI.

Arena Intelligence provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

## About Arena Intelligence, Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Arena Intelligence, Inc. (formerly LMArena/Chatbot Arena) operates a public, community-driven platform for evaluating large language models through anonymous head-to-head comparisons and voting.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, total $250M funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2025 (company incorporation; platform launched April 2023)
- **Founders**: Wei-Lin Chiang, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Ion Stoica

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI evaluation and research infrastructure
- **Target customers**: AI labs (OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, DeepSeek), enterprises, researchers, and the general AI community (B2B and B2C)
- **Mission**: Fuel the world’s most trusted AI evaluation platform, using real-world community votes to benchmark model performance

## Products & Services
- **LMArena Platform**: Public web-based platform where users enter prompts for two anonymous models, vote on the better response, and then see the models’ identities. Supports text, vision, web dev, search, video, and image modalities. Over 50 million votes collected.
- **Max (Model Router)**: An intelligent orchestrator that routes each user prompt to the most capable model for that specific prompt, powered by 5+ million real-world votes.
- **Enterprise Evaluation Product**: Launched September 2025, provides rigorous, reproducible evaluations for AI labs and enterprises, generating actionable feedback on model performance.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: $100M annualized revenue run rate as of June 2026 (achieved within 8 months of enterprise offering launch)
- **Total Funding**: $250M (Seed $100M led by Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments in June 2025; Series A $150M led by Felicis and UC Investments in January 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Felicis, UC Investments, Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Laude Ventures
- **Growth Signals**: Community grew 25x in one year; 50 million votes, 400+ model evaluations, 145k open-source battle data points; operates in 5 countries (US, Germany, UK, UAE, Canada); headcount of 49 with +10.5% monthly growth

## Competitive Advantages
- **Community-driven data**: Trusted by major AI labs for real-world, reproducible evaluations; 10M+ community members contribute diverse prompts and votes
- **First-mover & brand**: The de facto public leaderboard for LLM comparison; used for pre-release model testing (e.g., DeepSeek R1, GPT-5 "summit", Gemini 2.5 Flash Image "Nano Banana")
- **Open science**: Academic partnerships program funding independent research on AI evaluation methodology
- **Revenue velocity**: Achieved $100M ARR in under a year from enterprise launch, indicating strong product-market fit

## Strategic Focus
- Scale the platform with new features and modalities (video, search, web dev)
- Deepen enterprise offerings and model routing capabilities (Max)
- Expand academic partnerships to advance the science of AI evaluation
- Continue to serve as the gold standard for real-world model performance benchmarking

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast-moving, research-driven startup with roots at UC Berkeley; emphasis on community, open source, and rigorous science
- **Team**: 49 employees, 41% technical (Data Engineers, ML Scientists, ML Engineers, Software Engineers), with talent from top AI labs and universities (Berkeley RISE Lab, Google, Apple)
- **Growth**: High-growth environment (revenue run rate doubled rapidly, headcount growing ~10% monthly)
- **Location**: Headquarters in San Francisco (2261 Market St., Ste 85064); offices also in SF (two additional locations). Likely hybrid/office-based given SF HQ and local employee concentration.
- **Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but typical for VC-backed startup (equity, competitive comp, impact on foundational AI infrastructure)

## Sources
1. [arena.ai](https://arena.ai/)
2. [arena.ai/blog/series-a](https://arena.ai/blog/series-a/)
3. [linkedin.com/company/arenaai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/arenaai)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/arena](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/arena)

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