Director of People Operations

Department: Operations
Reports to: Chief Operating Officer
Direct Reports: 1
Classification: Full-Time, Exempt
Work Arrangement: Hybrid; in-office presence as organizational needs require

Position Summary

The Director of People Operations leads the systems, practices, and strategies that enable our people to do exceptional work and our organization to perform at its best.

Serving as the organization’s senior internal Human Resources expert, the Director has functional ownership of People Operations, including employee relations and compliance, talent acquisition, performance management, training and development, compensation and benefits, payroll administration, workforce planning, organizational learning, employee experience, and people systems and analytics.

This role combines strong HR expertise with systems thinking, organizational development, and evidence-informed decision-making. The Director is expected not only to operate strong HR systems, but to continuously improve them and build the organizational capabilities needed for long-term success.

The Director owns the People Operations function. Managers remain accountable for leading, coaching, developing, and managing their employees. The Director works in close partnership with the Chief Operating Officer and other leaders where people strategy intersects with organizational strategy, structure, financial stewardship, risk, leadership effectiveness, and significant organizational change.

The Director must know when to lead, when to coach, when to advise, when to partner, and when to escalate.

Core Responsibilities

1. HR Operations, Employee Relations & Compliance

The Director owns the integrity and effectiveness of the organization’s core HR practices.

• Maintain legally compliant, consistent, equitable, and effective employment practices.
• Lead employee relations, including workplace concerns, investigations, accommodations, leaves, corrective action, performance concerns, and separation processes.
• Advise managers and leaders on employment matters and appropriate people-management practices.
• Develop, interpret, administer, and improve HR policies, procedures, and documentation.
• Identify, assess, and escalate significant people-related legal, compliance, ethical, financial, and reputational risks.
• Maintain appropriate employment records, documentation, confidentiality, and controls.
• Manage the organization’s PEO relationship and coordinate with employment counsel and other specialists as appropriate.
• Monitor HR practices for recurring issues, inconsistencies, and opportunities for improvement.

2. Talent, Performance, Training & Development

The Director owns the systems that enable the organization to attract, onboard, develop, retain, and effectively manage talent. Managers remain accountable for the performance and development of their employees.

• Lead talent acquisition, selection, onboarding, and retention practices.
• Lead the organization’s performance-management framework, processes, tools, and annual cycle.
• Equip and coach managers to set expectations, provide feedback, develop employees, address performance concerns, and hold people accountable.
• Lead the organization’s training and professional-development strategy.
• Assess individual, team, leadership, and organizational development needs.
• Design, coordinate, source, and evaluate employee, manager, and leadership development.
• Establish effective individual development-planning practices and connect development to performance, competencies, career growth, and succession.
• Build systems supporting continuing education, professional development, internal mobility, and emerging-leader development.
• Ensure employees have equitable access to meaningful development opportunities.
• Evaluate whether training and development investments improve capability, behavior, and performance.

People Operations builds the systems and capability for strong people management; it does not manage employees on behalf of managers.

3. Organizational Learning & Capability

The Director helps ensure critical organizational capabilities are learned, applied, reinforced, and sustained.

• Embed coaching as a core management and leadership practice.
• Support the integration and sustained use of Results Count and other adopted organizational learning and results frameworks.
• Ensure new employees receive appropriate training in Results Count and other competencies relevant to their roles.
• Support organization-wide project-management capability and reinforcement of consistent project-management practices.
• Strengthen role-appropriate data capability among employees and managers.
• Use job analysis and competency practices to strengthen alignment among roles, responsibilities, skills, performance expectations, and organizational needs.
• Connect onboarding, training, coaching, performance management, development, and succession into an integrated learning system.
• Establish ways to assess whether critical competencies are being applied and sustained over time.

The Director owns the organizational infrastructure for capability building but is not expected to personally deliver every training or coaching engagement.

4. People Strategy, Workforce Planning & Organizational Effectiveness

The Director provides the people expertise and workforce insight needed to support strong organizational decisions.

• Develop People Operations priorities aligned with organizational needs and priorities.
• Advise senior leaders on talent, workforce capacity, leadership capability, succession, and organizational effectiveness.
• Lead workforce-planning analysis and identify critical roles, capability gaps, succession risks, and workforce vulnerabilities.
• Develop succession-planning approaches and support internal talent pipelines.
• Anticipate emerging workforce and capability needs.
• Recommend strategies including internal development, recruitment, role redesign, technology, outsourcing, or additional capacity.
• Help leaders distinguish individual performance issues from structural, leadership, workload, process, or system problems.
• Partner on organizational design, role clarity, significant workforce changes, and change management.

The Director provides People Operations expertise and recommendations. Executive leadership retains responsibility for enterprise strategy, organizational structure, resource allocation, and significant organizational decisions.

5. Compensation, Payroll, Benefits & Total Rewards

The Director owns People Operations administration and expertise related to compensation, payroll, benefits, and total rewards.

• Lead compensation research, benchmarking, salary administration, and job architecture.
• Monitor internal equity and external competitiveness and develop evidence-informed recommendations.
• Oversee employee payroll administration and PEO coordination.
• Oversee benefits administration, enrollment, compliance, and relationships with benefits partners.
• Evaluate compensation and benefits based on employee needs, competitiveness, equity, cost, and organizational sustainability.
• Partner with Finance and executive leadership on workforce costs, compensation planning, and total-rewards strategy.
• Ensure employees and managers understand applicable compensation and benefits practices.

People Operations owns employee payroll administration and PEO coordination. Finance retains responsibility for financial controls, accounting, reconciliation, and financial oversight.

6. People Systems, Analytics & Continuous Improvement

The Director owns the effectiveness of People Operations infrastructure and workforce information.

• Oversee HR technology, systems, workflows, records, and People Operations processes.
• Maintain appropriate HR data integrity, confidentiality, access, documentation, and security practices.
• Establish clear processes and standard operating procedures for critical People Operations work.
• Develop meaningful workforce metrics, dashboards, and reporting.
• Analyze trends in hiring, retention, turnover, compensation, engagement, performance, development, and workforce capacity.
• Use workforce data, employee feedback, credible research, benchmarking, and professional expertise to inform recommendations.
• Identify opportunities to simplify, automate, and improve People Operations processes, including responsible applications of AI and emerging technologies.
• Evaluate whether People initiatives are achieving their intended outcomes.
• Build documentation and distributed capability so critical processes do not depend on one person.

The Director should help the organization answer not only “What is happening?” but also “Why might it be happening, how do we know, and what should we do about it?”

7. Employee Experience & Culture

The Director provides systems, insight, and expertise that help the organization strengthen employee experience and culture. Culture remains a shared leadership responsibility.

• Develop meaningful mechanisms for understanding employee experience and organizational health.
• Lead employee listening, engagement, and feedback processes.
• Identify patterns affecting trust, collaboration, accountability, belonging, workload, retention, and organizational effectiveness.
• Translate employee feedback and workforce information into actionable recommendations.
• Help leaders understand how management practices, organizational systems, and decisions affect employees and culture.
• Support organizational change with attention to employee impact, communication, adoption, and sustainability.

People Operations helps steward culture. Every leader and manager is accountable for the culture their leadership creates.

Decision Rights & Partnerships

The Director has meaningful authority to lead the People Operations function within approved policies, budgets, and organizational authority.

The Director owns and may make routine decisions regarding:

• People Operations procedures, workflows, standards, and operating practices.
• Administration and interpretation of approved HR policies.
• HR processes for employee relations, performance management, investigations, onboarding, training, and development.
• HR documentation and recordkeeping requirements.
• Approved compensation, payroll, and benefits administration.
• PEO management and routine external-provider relationships.
• People Operations systems, reporting, metrics, and process improvements.
• Approved learning and development approaches, resources, and vendors.

The Director does not need executive approval to perform the normal professional responsibilities of the People Operations function.

The Director recommends and advises on significant corrective action and separations, compensation changes, benefits strategy, workforce plans, position design, organizational restructuring, succession, leadership development priorities, material policy changes, and significant workforce investments or reductions.

Managers own employee performance and day-to-day people leadership. Final significant employment decisions are made by the appropriate organizational leader in consultation with People Operations and consistent with established approval authority.

Enterprise-level decisions—including material organizational restructuring, unbudgeted workforce expenditures, executive employment decisions, significant compensation or benefits strategy changes, and material workforce reductions—remain subject to appropriate executive, financial, or governance approval.

The Director has a duty to escalate significant legal, compliance, safety, ethical, employee-relations, financial, or reputational risk and to clearly advise leadership when a proposed action creates unacceptable risk.

Leadership Expectations

The Director is expected to:

• Exercise sound judgment: Balance law, policy, evidence, organizational needs, risk, and employee impact.
• Tell the truth with care: Provide candid professional counsel, including when the answer is difficult or inconvenient.
• Think in systems: Look beyond individual incidents to identify structural, leadership, process, and organizational patterns.
• Follow the evidence: Use credible research, workforce information, professional expertise, and organizational context rather than assumptions or trends alone.
• Build capability: Develop managers and employees instead of becoming the permanent solution to work others should learn to own.
• Turn learning into practice: Build reinforcement, application, feedback, and measurement into development.
• Design for sustainability: Build systems and distribute knowledge so critical work does not depend on one individual.

Supervisory Responsibilities

The Director supervises one People Operations team member and manages the organization’s PEO partnership and related external providers.

The Director is responsible for establishing expectations and priorities, providing regular coaching and feedback, delegating meaningful responsibility, developing team capability, holding team members accountable, and ensuring appropriate documentation and cross-training.

The Director should model the leadership and development practices expected throughout the organization.

Qualifications

Required

• Significant progressive Human Resources or People Operations experience across multiple HR disciplines.
• Demonstrated expertise in employment law and compliance, employee relations, compensation and benefits, performance management, talent management, and HR operations.
• Experience advising senior leaders on complex employee and organizational matters.
• Demonstrated success coaching managers and developing others.
• Experience designing or strengthening training, professional development, leadership development, or organizational learning initiatives.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, systems-thinking, and continuous-improvement capabilities.
• Experience using workforce data, credible research, and professional expertise to inform decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to develop or significantly improve HR policies, systems, processes, or programs.
• Comfort with HR technology and emerging tools.
• Excellent communication, judgment, discretion, and relationship-building skills.

Strongly Preferred

• SPHR, SHRM-SCP, or demonstrated equivalent mastery.
• Experience working with a PEO or similar outsourced HR, payroll, and benefits model.
• Experience with organizational design, change management, workforce planning, leadership development, and/or organizational learning.
• Experience with people analytics and workforce dashboards.
• Experience applying AI, automation, or emerging technology responsibly within HR or organizational operations.

What Success Looks Like

Success is not measured by how many responsibilities the Director personally absorbs. It is measured by whether the organization becomes stronger and increasingly capable of managing and developing its people well.

Success should include:

• Strong, consistent, compliant, and well-documented employment practices.
• Reduced preventable people and organizational risk.
• Accurate and reliable payroll and benefits administration.
• Managers increasingly capable of coaching, developing, providing feedback, managing performance, and holding employees accountable.
• Training and development connected to demonstrated capability needs and evidence of improved performance.
• Coaching becoming a consistent management and leadership practice.
• Results Count and other adopted frameworks becoming embedded and sustained in relevant organizational practices.
• Sustained project-management and role-appropriate data capabilities.
• Stronger alignment among roles, competencies, performance expectations, and development.
• Strong recruitment, onboarding, retention, development, and succession practices.
• Reliable workforce information supporting better organizational decisions.
• Efficient, documented, scalable People Operations systems with reduced key-person dependency.
• A People Operations function known for expertise, credibility, judgment, responsiveness, partnership, and continuous improvement.

Specific annual priorities, performance indicators, and targets will be established with the COO based on organizational needs, adopted milestones and commitments, workforce needs, and risk.

Ultimately, the Director should leave the organization more capable than they found it—with stronger leaders, stronger systems, clearer accountability, better information, and an environment where exceptional people can do exceptional work.

Position Details

This position is a regular, full-time, and benefits eligible position. The anticipated start date is on or before September 28, 2026. UP Partnership staff are currently working on a hybrid schedule blending in-office and remote work. To apply for this position, please submit your cover letter and resume.

UP Partnership, formerly the P16Plus Council of Greater Bexar County, is a collective impact partnership that leverages data and coordinates leaders to drive equitable youth outcomes across San Antonio. For more information about our organization, visit our website at UP Partnership.

UP Partnership is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.