
People Operations Manager at Profound (New York, NY)
Profound· New York, NY· $130k–$190k·
Role details
Equity · Competitive Base Salary · Full Range Of Benefits And Perks
Profound at a glance
Full-stack marketing platform for the AI era that measures and improves how brands appear across AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Profound tracks how AI answer engines mention, rank, cite, and describe a brand, capturing responses directly from the consumer browser rather than model APIs. It then gives marketers demand data (Prompt Volumes), crawler and AI-referral analytics (Agent Analytics), and autonomous agents to create and optimize content, so teams can diagnose and fix an AI visibility gap in one platform.
$155M+ raised · latest: Series C · $96M · February 2026 · $1B valuation · backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures
Summary
The People Ops Manager owns end-to-end people operations, including onboarding, performance management, benefits, and compliance. This hands-on role involves partnering with leaders to build lightweight processes, optimize HR systems like Rippling, and ensure a consistent employee experience during rapid scaling.
Job description
Profound is the fastest-growing AI marketing platform, used by 15% of the Fortune 500 including Comcast, Estée Lauder, and Walmart, and innovators like Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. It is where marketing teams do the work: research, briefs, content, campaigns, reporting, all in one place, alongside agents that carry the load with them. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound’s data shows you what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer joins that data with deep context about our customers to find the opportunities worth acting on, and then puts agents to work: automating reporting, drafting content, auditing pages for readability, running competitive research. It measures what works and gets better every day. As we scale rapidly, we are hiring a People Operations Manager to own people operations and the employee experience, from onboarding and manager enablement to performance conversations, benefits, and compliance.
This is a hands-on, builder role for someone who wants to be close to the business, help leaders and employees day to day, and build lightweight people processes that actually work at a fast-growing startup.
What you’ll do
- Maintain Rippling as the source of truth for people data, ensuring accuracy across the employee lifecycle - from open requisitions and hire records to role changes, compensation updates, and offboarding
- Own global employee onboarding end to end, including the bespoke needs of cross-functional partners across time zones, with a commitment to timeliness, data accuracy, and a great first experience
- Respond to inquiries from employees and cross-functional partners: payroll, finance, legal, IT, and recruiting with accuracy, care, and a bias toward resolution
- Partner across Operations, Finance, Legal, and external vendors to build an interconnected people operations system that scales with the company
- Manage payroll, benefits administration, open enrollment, and compliance across our global employee base, leveraging Rippling to optimize and automate wherever possible
- Support employment verifications, employment documentation, and immigration and compliance matters in partnership with legal
- Continuously measure and improve the employee experience - tracking operational metrics and using them to identify gaps and drive iteration
- Act as a thought leader in leveraging AI and automation to eliminate repetitive administrative work, raise accuracy, and deliver a best-in-class employee experience
- Bring people operations work currently handled by external partners in-house, building lightweight, scalable processes that work for a fast-growing global team
Who you are
- 5+ years in people operations or HR at a high-growth startup, with direct experience scaling through rapid headcount growth
- Deep proficiency with Rippling - across HRIS, payroll, benefits, devices, and system access and comfort with advanced data analysis to surface operational insights
- The ability to deconstruct people processes to their core components, identify root causes for gaps, and rebuild them with less overhead
- Experience supporting a globally distributed workforce and navigating the compliance and operational complexity that comes with it
- Fantastic communication and interpersonal skills. You can explain a benefits renewal or a payroll change to anyone and make it feel simple
- A genuine passion for building systems that scale and employee moments that feel effortless, especially through AI-powered solutions
- Unwavering attention to detail and a high bar for accuracy - you treat data integrity as a craft
Location This is an on-site role based in our NYC or SF office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact. For this role, the expected base salary range is $130,000 to $190,000. Profound’s total compensation package is designed to be competitive and includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring. Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.
Why work at Profound
- Compensation: Strong base salary plus significant equity in a well-funded unicorn.
- Culture: High-context, direct communication with a bias for action; “merit-driven, not tenure-driven” career acceleration.
- Work model: In-office presence required in NYC, SF, London, or Buenos Aires; daily catered meals, late-night Uber reimbursement, fitness stipend, and flexible time off.
- Engineering focus: Key roles include Agent Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer – competing for AI talent against companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Growth: Rapid scaling environment with visible impact; opportunity to define a new category.