Lead People Partner

London, Hybrid: 1- 3 days as the London HQ grows

The Opportunity:

Hawkwood is exclusively partnering with a fast-growing, VC-backed fintech to appoint a Senior/Lead People Partner at a pivotal stage of its international growth.

This is a genuinely mission-led business, focused on making financial services more accessible, affordable and relevant for communities historically underserved by traditional providers. Having already scaled to several hundred employees internationally, the business is continuing to expand across new markets and products.

With that growth comes increasing organisational complexity. The People function is evolving accordingly, and this hire will take functional ownership of People Partnering, working directly with the C-suite and senior leadership on the organisation’s most important people and organisational challenges.

Reporting into the Chief People & Legal Officer, this is initially a senior individual contributor role with one direct report. It offers the opportunity to move beyond delivering within an established People Partnering model and instead shape and build one.

The longer-term ambition is for this person to develop the global People Partnering capability, with the potential to progress into Head of People Partnering as the organisation and function continue to scale.

What you'll do:

• Act as a trusted People Partner to C-suite executives and senior leaders, providing commercially grounded advice on complex organisational and people decisions.
• Take ownership of the People Partnering agenda and help define what an effective global partnering model should look like as the business scales.
• Lead complex organisation design, restructuring and workforce planning initiatives across an evolving international organisation.
• Support leaders through difficult organisational decisions, including restructures, redundancies, role changes and broader transformation programmes.
• Strengthen performance management and organisational performance, developing pragmatic frameworks suited to a fast-moving environment.
• Lead and influence talent planning, succession, critical-role identification and leadership capability initiatives.
• Partner on reward and compensation decisions, including bonus structures, promotions and the connection between goals, performance and reward.
• Help shape leadership development, culture and broader organisational effectiveness.
• Use engagement, retention and wider People data to identify organisational health issues and make evidence-based recommendations.
• Contribute to significant cross-functional People initiatives, which may include People technology, workplace strategy and organisational change.
• Explore practical opportunities to use AI and automation to simplify People processes and improve how the organisation operates.
• Lead and develop a junior People Partner/Advisor, while helping determine how the global partnering capability should evolve.

You will bring:

• Significant experience as a Senior, Principal or Lead People Partner, Senior HRBP, or in a similarly broad People role within a scaling technology-led organisation.
• Genuine C-suite credibility, with evidence that senior executives have trusted you to advise them on difficult organisational decisions.
• Strong organisation design experience, including personally leading meaningful restructures, organisational change and workforce planning.
• First-hand experience of genuine organisational scale and complexity – ideally within a business that has grown rapidly through the 200–1,000+ employee stage.
• A highly commercial approach, with the ability to balance business performance, cost, risk, speed and employee considerations.
• A builder mentality: you are comfortable creating solutions where established processes, frameworks or specialist resources do not yet exist.
• The resilience and judgement to operate effectively with demanding senior stakeholders, changing priorities and imperfect information.
• A hands-on approach. You are equally comfortable advising executives and personally doing the work required to move an initiative forward.
• Broad capability across areas such as talent, performance, leadership, culture and reward, without needing to be a specialist in every discipline.
• Curiosity around AI and how emerging technology can improve People practices and organisational effectiveness.
• The ambition to step into greater functional ownership and, over time, build a global People Partnering capability.
• Experience partnering across multiple geographies and employment jurisdictions would be a bonus, particularly within an international or distributed organisation.

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