---
title: 'Senior People Operations Manager at Wordsmith AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-people-operations-manager-wordsmith-ai-edinburgh-7wamxzk5jm75'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-30'
---

# Senior People Operations Manager at Wordsmith AI

- **Company:** Wordsmith AI
- **Location:** Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-30
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wordsmith/a5cc66fd-517b-444f-86c9-eda56d248895

## Job description

Wordsmith Wordsmith is building the legal operations platform for in-house teams, and we are growing fast. We believe in-house legal is becoming one of the most important functions in the AI era. Every business is moving faster, but legal work is still too often scattered across inboxes, chats, documents, and disconnected systems. Wordsmith brings that work into one system. Requests come in from across the business, AI agents handle the routine, lawyers stay in control where judgment matters, and every step is captured as work happens. We are built for in-house legal, not law firms. Our goal is to help legal teams move faster, reduce unnecessary external counsel spend, and become a function the business can run with. More than 500 companies, including Financial Times, Safelite, [Trip.com](http://Trip.com), Canva, Starling, and Sage, use Wordsmith. Backed by $100M from Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Highland Europe, and others, we are building one of the defining companies in legal AI.

## The Role

You’ll own the operational backbone of our People function: payroll, global mobility, PEOs, commission and equity administration, HRIS, and the systems that keep everything in sync. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on clean operations, not a junior administrator position and not a People leadership seat. You'll operate the frameworks our leadership and Finance set (pay philosophy, salary bands, commission structure, equity strategy). Your job is to implement those decisions accurately and on time, with a clear audit trail, and with the judgment to stop or escalate anything that doesn't fit the framework or lacks proper approval.

## What You'll Do

- Own payroll controls and monthly validation across UK payroll, PEOs, and other employment models, with clean reconciliation to Finance each month
- Run visa and mobility operations end-to-end: sponsorships, relocations, compliance, right-to-work controls, and coordination with immigration advisers.
- Manage commission review, approvals, exceptions, ns and payment accuracy each cycle; reconcile commission data between sales systems, Finance, and payroll
- Own equity grant administration: approvals, documentation, vesting schedules, leaver events, exercises, cap table reconciliation and employee communications
- Build and improve people workflows in Humans, Ashby and connected systems, using automation to remove manual steps from pay reviews, promotion packs, onboarding and routine queries.
- Own onboarding, probation, employment changes, transfers, parental leave, and offboarding end-to-end: coordinate access, equipment, payroll and documentation across People, IT, Finance and hiring managers

## What We're Looking For

Essential

- 5+ years of People Operations or HR generalist experience in a scaling technology business or high-growth scaleup, with meaningful hands-on work in payroll, mobility, PEOs and benefits
- Track record of building and running multi-country people processes from the ground up, not just maintaining existing structures.
- Confidence owning payroll controls, global mobility operations and equity administration across multiple jurisdictions
- Strong data literacy and experience with HRIS platforms, payroll systems and ATS integrations, with a bias toward automation over manual work
- Clear written communicator who can produce clean documentation and audit-ready records

Valued

- Experience independently owning multi-country payroll, mobility and equity through a scale up's growth phase.
- Familiarity with PEO relationships, renewals and service management
- Experience with commission administration and pooling

## How We Work

We're an office-first team in London. You'll be based at our offices on Paul Street and expect to work in-office as your default. We work together because it helps us move faster, collaborate closely across Finance, IT and People, and stay sharp on detail. This role sits at the center of trust for the whole company. We expect high standards of accuracy, timeliness and data integrity. You'll manage sensitive information and ensure payments, visas, and equity records are handled properly. People will come to you with urgent requests and competing priorities. You need to stay organised, keep control of your workload, and know when to push back and when to escalate. This isn't a role for someone who needs a heavy process or lots of direction.

## Why Wordsmith

We're scaling fast across product, commercial, and engineering, and People operations is foundational to that growth. Every new hire adds complexity to payroll, visas, benefits, and equity. Getting that right, automated, ed and audit-ready is what lets us move quickly without losing control. This role is a key foundational hire. You'll be building the systems and processes that scale with us from ~130 people toward 300. You'll have real ownership over how the function works, and a clear seat in how we operate. You'll report to our Head of People (or interim People leader, with a clear line to a future Head of People), work closely with Finance and leadership, and have meaningful say in how we run the function.

## About Wordsmith AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Wordsmith provides an AI-native legal operations platform that captures, triages, resolves, and records every legal request from the business, enabling in-house legal teams to work at the speed of AI.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: London, England, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Ross McNairn (CEO), Volodymyr Giginiak (CTO), Robbie Falkenthal (COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Legal Technology (LegalTech), Enterprise AI, Workflow Automation
- **Target customers**: In-house legal departments at mid-to-large enterprises across all industries (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To be the Northstar for legal intelligence in business — to bring the legal function in-house by making it measurable, compressible, and owned, just as every other major corporate cost centre has been.

## Products & Services
- **The Wordsmith Platform (Legal Operations System)**: An end-to-end AI-native system built around four core workflows: **Receive** (captures legal requests from Slack, email, Salesforce, Teams, and procurement systems), **Route** (assigns ownership, priority, and context), **Resolve** (automates routine legal work using AI agents — drafting, redlining, research, translation — while escalating complex decisions to lawyers), and **Record** (logs every decision, action, and rationale in real time for audit-ready governance).
- **Contract Review & Workflow Integration**: End-to-end contract review embedded directly into business tools like Slack, Gmail, and procurement systems. Reviews are collaborative and web-native.
- **Word Integration**: A plugin allowing lawyers to review, redline, draft, research, and translate without leaving Microsoft Word.
- **AI Agents**: Chain drafting into a full end-to-end workflow — receive the request, draft the document, route for approval, and send — with no manual step required.
- **Global Legal Intelligence Engine**: Covers hundreds of trusted sources across 130+ jurisdictions, combined with deep knowledge of the customer’s own entities, risk profile, and prior positions.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised — **$100M** across two rounds. Last round: **€60.2M ($70M) Series B** (announced June 2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Index Ventures, Highland Europe, General Catalyst (the firms behind Figma, Stripe, Discord, Airbnb, Revolut, and Canva).
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Used by **500+ organisations globally**, including major enterprises such as **BT, Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, and Canva**.
    - Reports that **Trustpilot cut contract review time by 85%** using the platform.
    - Planning to grow workforce from ~100 to **~300 employees**, with significant **US market expansion**.
    - Founded in 2023 and achieved this scale in just over two years.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Category-defining position**: Wordsmith is not a legal copilot for individual lawyers — it is an **operating system for the entire in-house legal function**, managing complete request flows across the organisation. This system-level approach is a structural shift away from traditional point-tools.
- **Conflict-free business model**: Wordsmith sits on the side of the *buyer* of legal services (the in-house team), not the *seller* (law firms). All other legacy tools were built to serve law firms. Wordsmith’s incentives are aligned with removing friction and cost for the enterprise.
- **Vertical-first AI strategy**: Deeply specialised in legal workflows rather than a generalist AI platform, making the product deeply relevant and defensible in a $1.1T global legal market.
- **Founding team**: Led by a CEO (Ross McNairn), CTO (Volodymyr Giginiak), and COO (Robbie Falkenthal) who blend legal domain expertise with deep AI and engineering capability.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale globally, with a US expansion priority**: The Series B is explicitly earmarked to accelerate growth in the US market.
- **Hire exceptional talent**: Grow the team to ~300 people, maintaining a “fewer, better people” philosophy — a small group of brilliant specialists rather than a crowd of generalists.
- **Product depth**: Continue to invest in AI agents, global legal intelligence, and deeper integration into enterprise workflows (Slack, Salesforce, Word, Gmail).
- **Move beyond task assistance to full automation**: The stated vision is to make legal “the last black box” in the enterprise — measurable, compressed, and owned internally.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Philosophy**: Described as a team of “lawyers and engineers blending two worlds.” Core operating principles include: **“fewer, better people”** (small, elite teams), **relentless focus on simplicity**, and building products that are so elegant they “feel like magic.” The company explicitly values **judgment** as the key differentiator in an AI-powered world.
- **Growth Trajectory**: A rare stage — Series B with $100M in funding, a small enough team that individual contributions matter every day, and early enough to shape how the company builds. Significant US expansion ahead.
- **Work Environment**: Hybrid (roles listed for Edinburgh and London). The hiring process is transparent and values speed: a 30-min screening call, a 45-min technical interview, a short take-home challenge (a couple of hours), and a culture interview.
- **Funding Backing**: Backed by the same investors who backed Figma, Stripe, and Canva — strong signal of ambition and long-term thinking.
- **Impact**: Working on a problem that is “genuinely new” — building the platform to run in-house legal teams, which is a category that did not exist before AI made it possible.

## Sources
1. [wordsmith.ai](https://www.wordsmith.ai/)
2. [wordsmith.ai/company](https://www.wordsmith.ai/company)
3. [wordsmith.ai/careers](https://www.wordsmith.ai/careers)
4. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/wordsmith-ai)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/wordsmith](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wordsmith)

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