---
title: 'People Operations Manager at Liquid AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-liquid-ai-san-francisco-e0f7yan7ee9e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-10'
---

# People Operations Manager at Liquid AI

- **Company:** Liquid AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-11-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/liquid-ai/0b41c5d4-d6bf-4b97-8d8d-1495856d0da8

## Job description

## About Liquid AI

Spun out of MIT CSAIL, we build general-purpose AI systems that run efficiently across every kind of hardware, from data center accelerators to on-device chips, ensuring low latency, minimal memory usage, privacy, and reliability. We partner with enterprises across consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services. We are scaling rapidly and need exceptional people to help us get there. The Opportunity Our People team shapes how Liquid AI grows and how we look after our people, across the US and around the world. We’re hiring a People Operations Manager to own our HR data and the operations that run on it, so every moment in someone’s time at Liquid AI is handled properly: their offer, their first day, a move to a new country, a visa, a pay review, their last day. Behind every record is a person. Getting the details right is one of the most direct ways we look after our team, and you’ll make sure they’re right without needing to be chased. You’ll report to our Head of People Operations and work closely with the engineers on our People team, testing and shaping the internal operating system they’re building. This is a hands-on operator role, not an HR business partner role. This role will be based in our SF office, typically 4 days a week.

## What We’re Looking For

We need someone who is:

- Detail-oriented: You notice when something doesn’t match, see how one change affects everything downstream, and fix it.
- A team player: You pitch in wherever the team needs you, and no task is too small.
- Self-directed: You get things done without much supervision, and you know when to escalate.
- Someone who ships: You work at pace, get through a high volume of work, and don’t let quality slip while you do it.
- Someone who cares about people: You see this work as part of how we look after our team, and you handle sensitive information with care.

The Work

- Own our HR data: keep HR, payroll and headcount records accurate and matching across systems, run regular checks, fix errors fast, and flag where they’re coming from
- Handle onboarding and offboarding admin: take care of the paperwork and system setup for every new starter and leaver, so their records are complete and correct from day one to their last
- Manage employee changes: process contractor conversions, moves between states or countries, contract amendments, salary changes, leaves and visa updates, so each one is touched once and done right in every system; for visas, work with our outside immigration counsel on documents and deadlines
- Run benefits operations: lead open enrollment, keep plan documents current and on hand, and work with our broker on renewals and compliance
- Manage our people vendors: be the day-to-day admin and escalation point for our HRIS, payroll, benefits and global EOR providers, and push open issues until they’re closed
- Run comp analysis and offer letters: benchmark roles against market data, model the full cost of offers and changes across countries, and prepare accurate offer letters consistent with approved terms
- Help run cross-functional projects: work with teams across the company on People projects, including our coworking weeks, which bring the team together several times a year
- Test and shape our internal operating system: be our main beta tester, running new features against real cases and working with the engineers until it’s right

## Experience & Capabilities

What you’ll need:

- Experience in People Operations, HR operations or payroll, including time at an early-stage startup or on a small team where you covered a bit of everything
- Hands-on admin experience with a modern HRIS (Rippling, Workday, Deel or similar), owning the data and processing onboarding, offboarding and employee changes in it
- Experience with employees across multiple US states and countries
- Working knowledge of US benefits and compliance (open enrollment, ERISA, COBRA)
- Strong spreadsheet and analysis skills: comp benchmarks, cost models, headcount reporting, and the habit of checking your own numbers

Helpful, not required:

- A background in finance, accounting or payroll
- Experience with US immigration processes (H-1B, O-1, green cards) alongside outside counsel
- Experience with comp benchmarking tools such as Pave or Carta

What Success Looks Like (Year One)

- HR, payroll and headcount records match across every system, with regular checks that catch errors before anyone else does
- Every employee change, benefits cycle and vendor issue is closed and tracked in one place
- Our internal operating system has a tight feedback loop with the operations work you do every day

## What We Offer

- Compensation & Equity: Competitive base salary plus equity, so you share in what we build. Final offers reflect skills, experience, and location.
- Time Off: Unlimited PTO, plus company-wide Refill Days, long weekends when the whole company rests together.
- Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive health coverage, with details varying by location.
- Paid Leave: Paid leave for pregnancy, parenting, medical needs, and caring for family.

## About Liquid AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Liquid AI builds efficiency-first, general-purpose foundation models designed to run on-device and at the edge, delivering state-of-the-art performance with minimal compute.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Ramin Hasani (CEO), Mathias Lechner (CTO), Alexander Amini (CSO), Daniela Rus

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Foundation Models
- **Target Customers**: B2B; Enterprise (e.g., automotive, finance, defense, e-commerce, biotech); developers building on-device or edge AI applications.
- **Mission**: To build efficient general-purpose AI at every scale — highly capable, compute-optimized, and ready to run on any device.

## Products & Services
- **Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs)**: A new generation of generative AI models optimized for on-device and edge deployment. They achieve state-of-the-art performance with a smaller memory footprint and more efficient inference than traditional transformers. Models range from 230M to 24B parameters, including specialized variants for vision (VL), multilingual search (Retrievers), and mixture-of-experts (MoE).
- **Liquid Edge AI Platform (LEAP)**: A full-stack SDK for fine-tuning, baking, and deploying LFMs to production. Supports runtimes like llama.cpp, MLX, ONNX, CoreML, SGLang, and vLLM, enabling rapid customization and deployment.
- **Research & White-Box Models**: The company publishes its research on liquid neural networks and state-space models in the open, emphasizing explainable, traceable AI over black-box approaches.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**:
  - **Total Funding**: $293.2M
  - **Annual Revenue**: $34.5K (early-stage; likely pre-revenue or nominal)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: AMD Ventures (led Series A), OSS Capital, Stephen Pagliuca; partners include Mercedes-Benz (in-car intelligence), Insilico Medicine (drug discovery), and hardware/infrastructure providers.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount of ~91 employees (as of mid-2026), with 8% monthly growth.
  - Active job postings: 18 (quarterly growth of +63.6%).
  - Rapid international expansion: operates in 12 countries including Japan, Germany, Spain, and France.
  - Recent product launch: LFM2.5 series (June 2026) — next-gen on-device models.
  - Strong talent pipeline: hires from MIT CSAIL, Stanford, Amazon, Meta, and Citadel.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Efficiency-First Architecture**: LFMs are designed from the ground up for compute- and cost-optimized inference, enabling deployment on phones, laptops, cars, and other edge devices where traditional LLMs are too large or slow.
- **White-Box Explainability**: The company prioritizes transparent, inspectable models over black-box systems — a key differentiator for regulated industries.
- **Rapid Customization**: The LEAP SDK allows clients to fine-tune and deploy specialized models in minutes, not weeks.
- **Strong Academic Roots**: Spun out of MIT CSAIL with a founding team of world-class researchers in liquid neural networks and state-space models.

## Strategic Focus
- **On-Device & Edge AI**: Primary growth vector is bringing advanced intelligence to processors outside data centers (automotive, mobile, IoT, defense).
- **Enterprise Partnerships**: Deepening collaborations with Mercedes-Benz (automotive) and Insilico Medicine (biotech) to embed LFMs into real-world products.
- **International Expansion**: Building out teams in Japan, Europe, and beyond to capture global demand for localized, on-device AI.
- **Model Line Expansion**: Continuously releasing new model sizes and modalities (vision, retrieval, MoE) to cover a broader range of use cases.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven & High-Impact**: Work on frontier AI research and products that directly shape how intelligence is deployed in the physical world.
- **Culture of Ownership**: “Leadership sets the destination, but the route is yours to discover and deliver” — high autonomy and trust, with a focus on building over process.
- **Transparent & Meritocratic**: Decisions are documented and traceable; ideas are valued based on evidence, not hierarchy.
- **Global & Diverse Team**: 91 employees across 12 countries; 30% in technical roles, 9% in research. Offices in Cambridge, MA (HQ) and satellite hubs in Japan and Europe.
- **Perks & Environment**:
  - Hybrid/office policy (Cambridge HQ with multiple local offices).
  - Strong emphasis on employee wellbeing: “the company prioritizes the needs and wellbeing of its people.”
  - Continuous learning culture: “everyone is expected to continuously fine-tune their skills.”
- **Recent Open Roles (as of mid-2026)**: ML Research Engineer, Applied ML (RecSys, Vision, Post-Training), Distributed Training Engineer, Solutions Architect, Founding Account Executive, Finance Manager.

## Sources
1. [Liquid AI Official Company Page](https://www.liquid.ai/company)
2. [Liquid AI Official Homepage](https://www.liquid.ai/)
3. [Liquid AI Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/liquid-ai)
4. [Liquid AI LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/liquid-ai-inc)
5. [Liquid AI About Page](https://www.liquid.ai/company/about)

## Other roles at Liquid AI

- [Associate General Counsel, Product & Regulatory](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-general-counsel-product-regulatory-liquid-ai-san-francisco-cv1mmvgze9a6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Recruiting Staff - Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-recruiting-staff-recruiter-liquid-ai-san-francisco-5q4n46nad1m3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategic Partnerships, Silicon Ecosystem](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-silicon-ecosystem-liquid-ai-san-francisco-0rdqr4ah7ven) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategic Business Development, Startups Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-business-development-startups-lead-liquid-ai-san-francisco-pg3krfkentsx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - ML Research Engineer, Pre-Training Data](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-ml-research-engineer-pre-training-data-liquid-ai-san-wgts2we7mtcg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Office Manager & Executive Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/office-manager-executive-assistant-liquid-ai-boston-dz1rgs3c6wcf) — Boston, MA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Applied ML, RecSys](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-ml-recsys-liquid-ai-boston-njmshfbyy3kq) — Boston, MA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Developer Relations](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-developer-relations-liquid-ai-san-francisco-cxa12bxjfrdn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategic Business Development, Life Sciences](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-business-development-life-sciences-liquid-ai-boston-abmzewrv1rne) — Boston, MA
- [Controller](https://feeny.ai/job/controller-liquid-ai-san-francisco-k2rh6jk06zz6) — San Francisco, CA