People Operations Lead

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Details

Preferred starting date: ASAP

Weekly availability: full-time on-site (5 days/week)

Location: Delft, the Netherlands

About the company

Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. Currently, we are developing software for advanced on-board UAV situational awareness in military applications. Using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute, our solutions are built for scalability. From there, we plan to develop a line-up of interconnected solutions to safeguard European safety.

Our team consists of engineers that are passionate about the technology and solutions they develop. The only time most of us are not thinking about the technology is when we are asleep, and sometimes even then. Our team members have a background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our office is located in the Aerospace Innovation Hub, a start-up hub located on the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.

We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from government agencies and prime contractors to academic research institutes and other start-ups. Our projects span from large tender orders in collaboration with partners to low TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment.

Your role

As our People Operations Lead, you will take ownership of our People Operations foundation and help us improve it as we scale: onboarding, contracts, employee records, HR workflows, hiring operations, manager support, and employee relations. You will report directly to the COO and work closely with leadership to make our people practices clearer, more consistent, and more scalable.

This is a hands-on improvement and scaling role. We already have the basic foundations in place, but they need to become more reliable, structured, and easier to run as the company grows. In the short term, you will bring stronger consistency, follow-through, documentation, and ownership to day-to-day people operations.

In the longer term, you will help shape how People Operations scales with the company. We are looking for someone with the ambition and judgment to grow with us, strengthen lightweight people systems, and eventually help design the People team we need for the next stage.

Our base is in the Netherlands, but our team is increasingly distributed. You will help us improve practical, compliant people practices that work across the Netherlands and other European countries, coordinating with the right internal owners and external advisors where needed.

We are an AI-first technical startup using tools such as Notion, Ashby, Slack, ChatGPT, and AI agents. You do not need to be technical, but you should be tech-savvy, structured, and curious about using modern tools to make People Operations faster, clearer, and less manual.

This role is for someone who has worked in a startup or scale-up before, loves improving messy-but-functional systems, and wants to make people infrastructure more reliable without slowing the company down with unnecessary bureaucracy.

Key responsibilities

People Operations foundation

• Build and run core People Operations processes across the employee lifecycle.

• Own workflows for contracts, onboarding, offboarding, employee records, HRIS/data hygiene, policies, and documentation.

• Manage probation tracking and make sure managers hold timely review conversations.

• Maintain and improve the employee handbook and core people documentation.

• Work closely with Finance on payroll, employment cost tracking, and related approvals, coordinating with external advisors where needed.

• Identify people risks early and escalate clearly to the COO and leadership team.

Hiring, recruitment, and distributed employment

• Support hiring managers with role setup, interview process, candidate communication, offer workflows, and hiring process discipline.

• Work closely with technical recruiters on niche talent sourcing, candidate pipeline quality, hiring priorities, interview process, and offer coordination.

• Support remote and international hiring, including employment, payroll, contract, relocation, and onboarding approaches for hires in other European countries.

• Coordinate 30% ruling applications for eligible employees in the Netherlands with external advisors.

• Ensure our people processes are grounded in Dutch employment practices while scalable enough for a distributed European team.

People systems, tooling, and project management

• Improve our trackers, templates, checklists, dashboards, and operating rhythms for people processes.

• Turn ambiguous people operations problems into practical workflows with clear owners, timelines, and next steps.

• Drive follow-through across managers, hiring teams, external advisors, and internal stakeholders.

• Use tools such as Notion, Ashby, HRIS platform, Slack, ChatGPT, and AI agents to reduce manual work and improve visibility.

• Gradually help build lightweight processes for performance reviews, salary reviews, role clarity, and future People function scaling.

What we expect from you

We are looking for a pragmatic, hands-on, highly structured People generalist who can create order without creating bureaucracy.

You are likely a strong fit if you have:

• 5–10 years of HR generalist, People Operations, or HR operations experience in the Netherlands.

• Experience in an international startup, scale-up, or fast-changing environment.

• Experience supporting remote or distributed teams, with a strong ability to figure out employment practices in other European countries.

• Strong knowledge of international hiring practices and the employee lifecycle: onboarding, contracts, HR administration, employee relations, performance support, and offboarding.

• Excellent documentation, process-building, and follow-up discipline.

• Strong project management instincts: you know how to create owners, timelines, trackers, and next steps.

• A builder mindset: you like creating useful systems, not just maintaining existing ones.

• The confidence to push back constructively and hold people to agreed processes.

• Interest in growing with the company and eventually helping build a broader People team.

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience in a deeptech, high-tech, AI, robotics, aerospace, defence, hardware, or engineering-led startup.

• Are tech-savvy and comfortable with tools such as Notion, Slack, HRIS platforms, Ashby, ChatGPT, and AI agents.

• Have built lightweight workflows, templates, databases, dashboards, or automations.

• Are curious about how AI can improve hiring, onboarding, HR documentation, manager support, and people operations.

You should believe that good People Operations is not about adding bureaucracy. It is about creating clarity, fairness, consistency, and better management.

We especially value people who can:

• Keep processes lightweight and useful.

• Balance empathy with accountability.

• Push back constructively when needed.

• Help first-time managers become better leaders.

• Work independently without needing a fully established People structure.

• Build people practices that work for both Dutch-based employees and distributed European team members.

• Move between hands-on execution and longer-term people system design.

What we offer

• Money of course.

• 25 vacation days per year.

• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop.

• Flexible working hours.

• A hands-on environment where your work will directly improve how the company operates.

• A chance to build the People function from the ground up and grow with the company.

• The opportunity to shape the future People team, not just operate existing processes.

• A fast-moving, mission-driven technical startup environment.

• A culture that values ownership, autonomy, direct communication, and practical problem-solving.

The application procedure

• If after reading the above you are convinced you are the right person for the job, send us some information about yourself; this can be a resume, website or other source, as long as we get a clear impression of your background and skills.

• We’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If we see a potential fit, you’ll first receive a short follow-up questionnaire. Based on your answers, we’ll invite you for an interview. This interview is an opportunity to talk through a real problem/scenario and show us you think and communicate.

• If at this point we feel you are the person we are looking for, we’ll discuss the specifics.

• Welcome to the team!