Senior People Ops Lead, AI-Foward

About Wati

Started as a WhatsApp team inbox in 2020, Wati has evolved into a full revenue orchestration system that goes beyond a single platform. We empower businesses that sell, support, and grow through conversations by observing customer intent in real-time, deciding the next best revenue action, and executing it seamlessly across marketing, sales, and support—all within WhatsApp and connected messaging channels.

Our Platform & AI Capabilities

Wati is designed for scalability and intelligence. Our AI-native platform simplifies complex customer communication operations through a unified inbox, a robust multi-channel messaging infrastructure, and no-code automation. At the heart of our solution is Astra, our intelligent AI layer, which helps you create AI Agents for all customer interactions and all your messaging platforms. By integrating AI agents into the ecosystem, we enable businesses of all sizes to deliver measurable ROI and build deeper customer relationships.

Our Backing & Partnerships

Trusted by over 16,000 customers across 190+ countries, Wati is proudly backed by world-class investors including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Shopify. As a Premium-tier Partner of Meta and Google, we maintain the highest standards of platform excellence and integration.

About the Role:
We're hiring a Senior People Operations Lead who pairs deep HR Ops fluency with genuine curiosity about AI — and who has the seniority to do more than run processes. This role owns our core people processes end-to-end — onboarding, offboarding, HRIS, HR reporting, and ESOP administration — and is expected to actively reshape how we run them.

Beyond operations, you'll bring hands-on experience in org design and the judgment to lead sensitive offboarding conversations directly. We don't want someone to keep the lights on; we want someone who looks at every recurring process and asks, "can AI or better systems do this faster, more accurately, or remove the manual work entirely?" — and who can then build and ship the fix themselves. You'll be embedded in a global, hybrid team supporting employees across multiple geographies. Your work directly shapes the experience of every new joiner, every leaver, and every leader who relies on people data to make decisions.

People Operations | Hybrid / Remote | Full-time

What You’ll Own

Onboarding & Offboarding

• Run the end-to-end onboarding and offboarding experience for a global hybrid and remote team — first-day setup, access provisioning, exit logistics, and everything in between.
• Lead sensitive offboarding and exit conversations directly, with the empathy and discretion to handle difficult separations while protecting both the employee experience and the business.
• Partner closely with the Talent team to ensure pre-onboarding documentation is complete, accurate, and ready before day one.
• Continuously redesign these flows so they feel high-touch to the employee while running with minimal manual lift.

Org Design & Workforce Structure

• Partner with leaders on organizational design — team structures, reporting lines, role definitions, and leveling — as the company scales across geographies.
• Support headcount planning, and structural changes with sound frameworks and a clear change-management approach.

HRIS Ownership & Systems Management

• Serve as the business owner of our HRIS — configuration, workflows, data integrity, user permissions, and system health.
• Manage the relationship with our HRIS Account Manager: roadmap conversations, escalations, contract renewals, and feature adoption.
• Drive integrations between the HRIS and adjacent tools (Slack, Claude AI, ATS etc.) wherever possible to streamline process and optimization.
• Maintain the HRIS as the single source of truth for people data, with audit-ready records and clear access controls.

HR Metrics & Reporting

• Produce the monthly month-over-month payroll variance report with clear commentary on what changed and why.
• Own quarterly ESOP reporting for management — accuracy, timeliness, and a story leaders can act on.

Process Optimization & AI

• Audit existing People Ops workflows and identify where AI tooling, automation, or smarter system design can remove manual work.
• Build prompt libraries, SOPs, and lightweight internal tools the rest of the People team can adopt with confidence — and ship them yourself rather than just scoping them.

Special Projects

• Lead ad hoc projects such as Compensation & Benefits analysis, benchmarking, headcount planning, and org-wide People initiatives as priorities shift.

Requirements

• 10+ years in HR Operations, People Ops, or a closely adjacent role, with hands-on ownership of onboarding/offboarding and direct experience leading offboarding and exit conversations.
• Demonstrated experience in organizational design — structuring teams, defining roles and levels, and supporting reorganizations in a scaling, multi-geography environment.
• Strong HRIS administrator experience — you've configured workflows, managed data, run reports, and owned a vendor relationship (BambooHR, HiBob, Workday, Rippling, Darwinbox, Keka, or similar).
• Comfortable working with people data: payroll variance, headcount, ESOP, attrition — you can pull it, validate it, and explain it.
• Genuinely AI-savvy: actively using LLMs in your daily work, building prompts that produce reliable output, and a clear point of view on where AI does and doesn't belong in HR.
• A builder and executor: you don't just identify what to fix or delegate it — you document, standardize, automate, and ship the work yourself.
• Excellent written communication — you can write a clear policy, a clean SOP, and a tactful offboarding email.
• Experience supporting a globally distributed, hybrid/remote workforce.